"Lorca's Novena", with its military shuffles and choruses of the damned wailing in and around the narcotic swirl of the strings, "Summer In Siam" with the piano like the waters trickle-tringing 'pon sun-scourged shoulders and the sax dancing in smoke-ring circles overhead. "Hell's Ditch" with its taunting, maniacal, increasingly frenzied accordion intro and its deranged eruptions of whirling opium orchestras thereafter. "Ghost Of A Smile" with its dreaming bass lines and its giddy whistle.
Holy lord Jesus and the sand-raw heels o' Mary, says I, it's enough to have a fella bent double o'er the speakers weeping and wailing in awe of every verse.
And those verses, those words…
Even when peering through the fog of a thousand and one hangovers and with the heroin mists all wreathing round the eyes, even then Shane emerges with a fistful of the most divine language a man could ever hope to lay a lobe 'alongside.
In "Hell's Ditch", inspired by Jean Genet, he watches the goings on in some terrible prison ward a million and nineteen miles removed from sanity or salvation;
"The killer's hands are bound with chains,
At six o'clock it starts to rain,
He'll never see the dawn again,
Our Lady of the Flowers"
And,
"Genet's feeling Ramon's dick,
The guy in the bunk above gets sick,
In the cell next door a lunatic,
Starts screaming for his mother"
In "Lorca's Novena" he muses upon the life and death of Federica Garcia Lorca, from the bullfight that killed his best friend and lover ("Ignacio lay dying in the sand / A single red rose clutched in a dying hand") to the bullet that ended him:
"And Lorca the faggot poet
They left till last,
Blew his brains out with a pistol up his arse
Mother of all our joys, mother of all our sorrows,
Intercede with him tonight,
For all of our tomorrows"
"Summer In Siam", which he intended as no more than a "musical haiku", but which the band stretched out to four and a bit minutes, with its half-asleep vision of a "moon full of rainbows".
"Rain Street", with its series of characters and episodes slathered in the blackest of humor and the most gorgeous vulgarity:
"The church bell rings, an old drunk sings,
A young girl hocks her wedding ring,
Down on Rain Street"
"Bless me father I have sinned,
I got pissed and I got pinned,
And God can't help the shape I'm in,
Down on Rain Street"
Article comments
1 - -E
Congrats! This article has been selected as one of this week’s Editors’ Picks.
2 - Duke De Mondo
thank you!