David Harley Words & Music

A song written in the 1980s about the conflict Jorge Luis Borges described as “a fight between two bald men over a comb.”

Backup:

The lads are on the march again: adrenaline is surging
Through the arteries of power
The gutter press is snarling, waving flags and beating chests
From the safety of its concrete Dockland towers
The price of bread is escalating and the jobs are getting scarce
But the circuses get bigger every year
If we lose the World Cup, God will give us back the Falklands
Before the latest Royal new-born appears

In the Corridors of Power, the game is Battleships:
Sink a few and lose a few – that’s Diplomacy
The body count gets higher, the planes and ships get fewer
The bereaved on both sides might agree
That the game’s not worth the candle standing by a single coffin
But there’s so much more at stake than death or life
There’s property and money and oil and mineral rights
And loss of face and patriotic pride.

The bombs and missiles blossom, and the gunfire pounds and pounds
The ears of friend and foe
The Belgrano and the Santa Fe, the Sheffield and Sir Tristram
Death by death the roll of honour grows
Till the fighting fizzles out in bitter winter gales
Far too late for so many mothers’ sons
The guns have fallen silent, but the words are bayonet-sharp
And the propaganda war goes on

The hawks are praising God across the tombstones of the dead
A service is attended by the Queen
The Prime Minister spits blood because a timid man of God
Recalls the dead on both sides in ‘victory’
Peace in the South Atlantic; a bombing in Hyde Park
Bloody warfare in the Lebanon
We press on to self-destruction: even as this one war ends
The killing still goes on and on and on

This is a piece that turned up during my ongoing sifting through (and digitizing where necessary and appropriate) all my non-security hardcopy from the 60s onward. This was written in the 80s (lightly edited here) but I never put a tune to it. Perhaps I never will, since it’s typical of the long and downbeat songs of mine that rarely garnered much enthusiasm from audiences. But it seems appropriate for these times.

I have a postcard from Hiroshima I pasted in a scrapbook
With some photographs of Dresden before the bombers came
I always meant someday to assemble them on canvas
I hope I have the time before the whole thing starts again

I’ll deploy them round some other shots of Coventry Cathedral
And the East End of London around 1943
And some more of Babi Yar, Dachau and Leningrad
To prove that no one’s safe or guiltless, not them, or you, or me

Christ was crucified again on barbed wire on the Somme
Torn by shrapnel in Guernica, starved in Biafra
In Warsaw he was lined up with the fighters from the ghetto
It could be me that squeezed the trigger, and the target could be you

There’s never been a simple answer, but the question’s getting bigger
Ukraine to Zimbabwe, Little Rock to Palestine
When our masters saw fit we were pointed at our targets
And scapegoats were graded by their religion or their skin

Don’t look at me that way, brother, I do mean you and me
It won’t always be us who get the cream
If you think your hands are clean, Soweto and Belfast
Kenya or the Congo might just show you what I mean

Christ is dying again on streets in India and Brazil
In Syria and Yemen, from Washington to Kyiv
East of Suez, West of China, New Cross and Brixton too
It could be me throwing petrol and the target could be you

But don’t let it get you down: the guns still buy the butter
For the tables of the wealthy and the leaders of men
And in a little while if the silos yield their harvest
There’ll be caviar and brandy for those sheltered till it ends

When they re-emerge to survey the devastation
There’ll be profits to be made from those not wiped out in the blast
The tyrants of the past will look down in grim approval
To see their life’s work ended so decisively at last

When Christ is dead and buried beyond hope of resurrection
With all the teeming millions who overran the nations
Of the world, our masters will cast lots for what remains
And the whole appalling cycle will be set to start again
But there’ll always be someone else to blame

David Harley