Dead Men Don't Talk

Don't you remember
when you used to beat our guts out
with the promise of a brave new world...

I love this song. On of the few that we played well on the few occasions that we did live appearances. I suppose I mean "played well", perhaps I mean played with crazed vigour. BN

On the recorded version there's a bit of modal silliness: I play the riff off the bottom E string (of course), so it's got an E, an F, a Bb, an A and a G in it. The synthy blippy bit is a D, which works modally (I'm not going to work out what the mode is right now, but it does), but sounds a bit strange in context. In performance we changed the blippy bit to a D, which works a bit better, although "a bit strange" was par for the course. I don't know what I'm worrying about. JP

Modal, Shmodal... BN

This song was precipitated by, I would not say about, something called Speak Bitters, which happened in China after the Revolution. These were public events in which the peasants spoke against their landlords and their abuse of the peasantry. They were held with the landlord present and bodily near, I think sometimes with the peasants sitting around the landlord in a circle. This was a state campaign as a part of land reform and resulted in claims against the landlords for land, goods, money, etc. The whole idea terrified me. GG

This track is included on Press My Hungry Button.

Dead men don't talk

You can crawl in the depths
you can crawl in your bloated
you can scream your weak
derisions, convictions, contradictions
because we all know dead men don't talk
you're flogging a dead horse my friend
a dead horse

You'd better hope your slick will mask
your dimming streets of vision
and you'd better hope that age will blur
your pretentious moralisms
they're going to be your epitaph my friend
your epitaph
and we all know dead men don't talk
you're flogging a dead horse my friend
a dead horse

Don't you remember when you
used to beat our guts out
with the promise of a brave new world

We're going to shake your dry and shrivelled mind
like a madman shakes a dead geranium
because remember
dead men don't talk my friend
dead men don't talk