Author: David Harley

Words and Music (c) David Harley

Here’s an MP3 recorded at Centre Sound, London, in the 1980s.

Backup:

Here’s the link to a video I recorded for Global Jamming St. Ives in support of Collective Aid, in Cornwall.

Here’s a link to their Just Giving page, if you care to contribute: they’re raising funds for a new van to help their operations in Northern France, supporting displaced people in Calais, Dunkirk and the Balkans.

And here are the lyrics.

Rapid-fire repartee, quicksilver conversation
Tongues that stroked and struck, caressed and clashed.
I remember all too well the arching of your eyebrows
When you pruned my self-importance when you saw that I’d been rash
And left my lines over-extended, and my flanks undefended:
Tactically, I never could compete with you.
But you always held back from the coup de grâce
So finally you met your Waterloo.

In the long years since I left you, I could never quite forget
Through all those other beds and battlefields.
It’s been so long since we crossed blades, and I forget the finer shades
Of the skirmishes where we laid steel to steel.
But the silk of your caress, and your blazing red-haired temper
Left a scar that never really did quite heal.
Like your after-midnight tenderness: somehow across the years
I never quite pull free of silk and steel
And I never quite cut free of silk and steel.

Silk and Steel is actually a type of guitar string with silk wound round steel. The song isn’t about guitar strings…

(Why would you use strings like that? Because they’re a bit easier on the fingers, though the tension is quite different to what you find on nylon strings, so the tone isn’t any more ‘classical’. In my experience, they didn’t last very well, so I didn’t use them for long.}

David Harley: vocal, acoustic guitar.