Epiphany

Listening Party for Done Different 2

https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/merch/done-different-2-listening-party

All welcome Thursday November 30 at 7pm. Hear the album played in full in public for the first time- 15 tracks, exactly one hour - and join in the chat about how we made it.

 

Who Killed Cock Robin Series 2 Episodes 1-3

No Future (The Ballad of Boudicca)

Boudicca's revolt of AD 61, part of our celebration of Norfolk and Greater Icenia and a signature track on our forthcoming double album Done Different.  All details in the press release appended to the film on You Tube.

Remembrance

The Death of Edith Cavell

Edith Cavell, a Swardeston nurse based in Brussels, was shot as an alleged spy on 12 October 1915. Her final statement (see chorus) seems an odd thing for a 'spy' to say. Her hospital - in Brussels, German occupied territory - tended soldiers of all nations and from both sides of the conflict. She risked her life to help recovered British and French soldiers to escape. This is our remembrance of her, set to an old English folk tune, as recorded for our forthcoming double album Done Different, which celebrates the history and people of Norfolk and Greater Icenia. This is the version we will be playing at the Remembrance Service at Fring All Saints(Norfolk) along with another song for Fight Sergeant Pilot Lancelot Percival Williamson and two poems by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen. Edith Cavell died 70 years to the day after Elizabeth Fry, the prison reformer, whose song precedes hers on the album. She sees the pale gold August wheat, The oaken greens of home, A mind’s-eye Norfolk harvest wrapped Around October’s bones. 6 paces off, 8 rifles point, Death scarves her blue-grey eyes, The woman stands and prays and waits And still no shot arrives… ‘Love of country’s not enough And when they shoot me dead Let bitterness and hatred die,’ Our Norfolk angel said. The British held the line at Mons, The French were in retreat, All stranded men came to her door Through Brussels’ conquered streets. 4 sneaks and spies to smoke her out, 3 days’ interrogation. She wouldn’t lie…. They shot her dead For love of more than nation. ‘Love of country’s not enough And when they shoot me dead Let bitterness and hatred die,’ Our Norfolk angel said. This link to the album goes live 7 pm Nov 30 2023. https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/al...

Where Crossroads Meet The Harrow

Half God Half Nelson

Our Admiral’s head it has one eye

Heave away! Heave away!

His empty sleeve’s the flag we fly.

‘Tell my wife I’m killed,’ we say.

Heave away Horatio’s boys

Heave away! Heave away!

Heave away and make a Victory noise

We're gone tomorrow but we're here today!

He hunted polar bears, the lad

Heave away! Heave away!

‘To fetch a white rug to my dad.’

‘Tell my wife I’m killed,’ we say.

Chorus

Mosquitoes bit him half to death:

Heave away! Heave away!

‘I’ll die a hero’s life instead’

‘Tell my wife I’m killed,’ we say.

Chorus

Off Corsica, his eye foresworn,

Heave away! Heave away!

‘I got a little hurt this morn.’

‘Tell my wife I’m killed,’ we say.

Chorus

Off Cape St Vincent, breaking ranks,

Heave away! Heave away!

He won the day and England’s thanks.

‘Tell my wife I’m killed,’ we say.

Chorus

Our king’s right hand at Santa Cruz;

Heave away! Heave away!

A night to seize; an arm to lose.

‘Tell my wife I’m killed,’ we say.

Chorus

‘A peerage or Westminster crypt!’

Heave away! Heave away!

He sinks the French from here to Egypt

‘Tell my wife I’m killed,’ we say.

Chorus

‘You’ll discontinue!’ flagged his Admiral.

Heave away! Heave away!

‘My blind eye does not see your signal!’

‘Tell my wife I’m killed,’ we say.

Chorus

‘Redoubtable’ sharpshooters spy him

Heave away! Heave away!

‘They’ve done for me at last. I’m dying.’

‘Tell my wife I’m killed,’ we say.

Heave away Horatio’s boys

Heave away! Heave away!

Heave away and make a Victory noise

We're heroes tomorrow but we're gone today!

Badass King John

@PeacockTaleFolkIndieDuo On the 7th anniversary of my rapping this as part of the civic unveiling of the statue of King John in Lynn (Oct 12 2016), an unexpected climax for the tour phase of the Doin Different project, here is a new version as a duo as heard on our double album of the project DONE DIFFERENT (releases November 2023). The entire civic ceremony (including the rap) was filmed in a borough council film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXE9BdSGCgM and it was the lead story on BBC LOOK EAST primetime news that day, including footage of the rap and an interview with yours truly.afterwards. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07xps0n Badass King John was Ballad 7 in the 39 ballad book https://www.poppyland.co.uk/products/B79622 and is track 4 on the new album. https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/done-different (link goes live November 2023).

The impressive statue, cast in bronze, was made by Scottish sculptor Alan Beattie Herriot, who was in the town to see it unveiled. Legend has it that on October 12, 1216 King John lost the crown jewels in the Wash, and the £22,000 statue was unveiled 800 years to the day later.

The Ruined Hall (from The House on the River) live at the Lynn Guildhall.

alternative lyric as published in 'Doin Differen't 2015) 

Strange that an Encyclopaedic Age

Leaves Fye Bridge House un-reckoned on its page.

But wait! a lace-cuffed bard with limpid eye

Is halted by a spirit thrilling by…

‘I haunt the former greatness of this Hall -

Before a ceiling floored its gothic stage,

My cheek is paper-white, my poppy

Mouth the blemish on a poet’s page.’

‘Consumptive spirit! Wild! Unbounded! Free!

O sleepless beauty past all human measure.’

She falls upon the thorns of life. I bleed!

Her gates of Eden open at my ple-….

‘I pine for Ruined Hall and sing

An elegy of days before a floor

Plucked window’s eye and clipped the wings

Of church-like space, staired flights unknown before!’

I charge her cup again, again, and ever:

Our Road to Wisdom’s Palace is Excess;

Her blood lips wailing for her demon lover

And black eyes staring from her naked breasts!’

Repeat ‘Consumptive spirit…’ Chorus

Alas! A pounding at the door, the vision flies.

The Parson calls on business, and the Poem ...dies!

The Vicar of Stiffkey

Another offering from Doin Different, our not so slim Poppyland volume of folk ballads published in 2015. The long-promised musical album of the book is approaching completion and is scheduled (fingers crossed) for release this Christmas.

Chronicling Norfolk ( and East of England) history from Boudicca and Fiddler's Hill - a haunted bronze age barrow in Binham -  to UEA and a contemporary carol at Lynn Minster, the book at this point reaches the (in)famous  tale of 'Little Jimmy', The Rector of Stiffkey, the 31st of 39 ballads, a story which gripped the nation at the time and is an emblem of the inter-war battle between the 'Victorian' establishment and the more permissive values of modern times. We hope you like our seaside postcard approach to the subject. 


PS 'Victorian' is in scare quotes because the period was actually one of the most progressive in history -  the abolition of slavery (its repression enforced by the royal navy), Married Women's Property Act, Universal Manhood suffrage, public sanitation, enormous advances in science and technology etc etc - but yes there was plenty to be progressive about.

The Ballad of the EAS Rider

The working class at University in 1977, when you got a grant and there were no tuition fees. 

lyrics

Twisting round my hair in knots, 
Twisting round your neck with thoughts. 
My oh my, you have to agree 
Certain issues of poetry 
Can’t conceive of a harmony. 

I’m twisting pastoral flowers into your face. 
I’m twisting your kind of thinking into place. 
I’m twisting… 

Listening to you plum for choice 
Between degrees of passive vice. 
‘There’s much that may be said for Donne.’ 
I am the outside world come in, 
Butchered hands and axe grinding, 
OPEN YOUR ED AND LET ME IN! 

I’m twisting pastoral flowers into your face. 
I’m twisting your kind of thinking into place. 
I’m twisting …. 

Your rich aesthetic literariness 
Is like the lush grass on a grave. 
My oh my I’m rotten through 
But life moves through and it’s sick, of you. 
I’ll thrust you off me and trample you. 

I’m twisting pastoral flowers into your case 
I’m twisting your kind of thinking into place. 
I’m … Terminating this debate!

Excalibur (A Dream Too Real To Live) from The Lost Land

"Throw back, throw back, Excalibur!"
I begged Bedwyr - and twice more -
"Throw back, grown black, Excalibur
That I might live forever
That Light might strike forever!
In wicked shifting thickets, the thorn
Of my heart's bursting must be:
Rose-clad, at home, and sleeping,
Or gone is the dazzling dream
That Artos, once man Arthur,
(Mis-mothered where life faltered
On long-fought malice Mordered)
Is God, is lord immortal:
A dream too real to live, thrown
Out of your world and hurled, look!

A Christ sword to Word your sky!"

From our forthcoming Arthur set "The Lost Land". The tune is the Lonely Ash Grove.

From our forthcoming Matter of Britain set "The Lost Land," this interpretation of the famous moment in the Arthur legends when the Mordred-conquering but broken king of Logres commands Bedivere (originally Bedwyr, first friend) to throw his enchanted sword Excalibur ('lightning blade') back into the Lake form whence it came, takes a number of things for granted which alas one cannot. First, that the Arthur legend is not the property of the English (as often believed) but of an older Celtic Britain which fought them for what became known as "Logres" the Lost Land - (modern Welsh Lloegr, England) - hence our use of a haunting Welsh tune. Second, the (to me) attractive Celtic 'otherworldliness' of the lyric is due - as in the verses of our "Morgan le Fay" - to my alternating use of two of the most common medieval Welsh meters (Morgan uses the other two) known collectively as cynghanedd (literally 'harmony')

The required intense focus on word-sounds and patterns here and in its sibling piece Morgan cast a spell over my composition which allowed magical thoughts to form. This in turn affected the choice of tune and the overall performance.

A Dream Too Real To Live (First Take)

"Throw back, throw back, Excalibur!"
I begged Bedwyr - and twice more -
"Throw back, grown black, Excalibur
That I might live forever
That Light might strike forever!
In wicked shifting thickets, the thorn
Of my heart's bursting must be:
Rose-clad, at home, and sleeping,
Or gone is the dazzling dream
That Artos, once man Arthur,
(Mis-mothered where life faltered
On long-fought malice Mordered)
Is God, is lord immortal:
A dream too real to live, thrown
Out of your world and hurled, look!

A Christ sword to Word your sky!"

From our forthcoming Matter of Britain set "The Lost Land," this interpretation of the famous moment in the Arthur legends when the Mordred-conquering but broken king of Logres commands Bedivere (originally Bedwyr, first friend) to throw his enchanted sword Excalibur ('lightning blade') back into the Lake form whence it came, takes a number of things for granted which alas one cannot. First, that the Arthur legend is not the property of the English (as often believed) but of an older Celtic Britain which fought them for what became known as "Logres" the Lost Land - (modern Welsh Lloegr, England) - hence our use of a haunting Welsh tune. Second, the (to me) attractive Celtic 'otherworldliness' of the lyric is due - as in the verses of our "Morgan le Fay" - to my alternating use of two of the most common medieval Welsh meters (Morgan uses the other two) known collectively as cynghanedd (literally 'harmony')

The required intense focus on word-sounds and patterns here and in its sibling piece Morgan cast a spell over my composition which allowed magical thoughts to form. This in turn affected the choice of tune and the overall performance.

Lady Guinevere - the music video

This Guinevere lyric is written in imitation of the French romance verse form (octosyllabic couplets giving a lighter, faster feel than the English iambic pentameter) and tries to evoke the medieval Guinevere of the troubadours of Provence rather than the Gwenhwyfar of Celtic myths and of Dark Age history (who will have her own very different song in the set). We wanted Guinevere to sound contemporary and confident, chipping against the beat of the courtly love tradition in which she was a love object rather than a love subject.

The original poem continues and concludes as follows:
I have a heart, self-determined
Core of I Am, God-underpinned,
Won on the Cross, for me. It can
Choose a beloved, a ‘husband’
The church would make him. But marriage
On earth’s not as it is (a rich
Royal land transaction) as one
With my Lancelot – in heaven.)  

lyrics

Lyric

Belle ami, si est de nous, ne vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous.

Let them play at boyish games round
A table. Though walled up, bound,
In an unpublished garden, stone
Tower with window, all alone,
This court still revolves around me.
I twist them all round my pretty
Little finger, a studded ring:
The champion knight, the poor king,
Modred, Gawain, my Lancelot.
It’s the only power I know.

Who waits… and do not wait to see  
The object of his worship pass,
Wasted, into this looking glass,
Wheat-hair, rose-lips, unsown, should he
Choose to deny himself – and me.

He comes through enchanted forests,
Rough-horses, haunted castles, mists;
From slaying giants, big bad knights:
Barons with feudal appetites;
Impossible quests for Our Lady,
Sowing wild seeds Love meant for me;
Obsessed so with courtly sin and
Confession – Indulgence’s twin;
Greets Artos, old friend – clash of mail 
(So grieved his crown still lacks a graal,
So tedious!) He comes to me  

Who waits… and do not wait to see  
The object of his worship pass,
Wasted, into this looking glass,
Wheat-hair, rose-lips, unsown, should he
Choose to deny himself – and me.

Anyone who's heard the hypnotic circling chords of CS & N's 'Guinnevere' on their eponymous album will know how flexible Arthurian romance can be. There, David Crosby is some West Coast modern day Lancelot caught - amid fraught pentagrams, orange trees, seagulls, gardens with aimlessly wandering peacocks etc - in a fatal spell of attraction for an elusive green eyed, gazing golden haired woman,  longing to be free out on the  sea with her. This is a long way from the Arthur of Dark Age history,  not quite so far  from Celtic mythology and a direct descendant of French romance:  the troubadours of Provence would have recognised this Norman version of The Matter of Breton in it even if the Dark Age warriors riding behind the Romano-Celtic Arth-Ursus into battle against the Saxons might have wondered what their warlord's shadowy wife 'Gwenhwyfar' (white phantom) was doing consorting with a general they hadn't even heard of, unless he was Llugh, the Celtic god of light and harvest, after which Londinos (London) is reputedly named. The point is, 'The Matter of Britain' has lasted because, like Britain itself, it has a magical relationship with time and place. It changes and it stays the same. 

My version of Guinevere below is very much the French romance one, the Matter of Britain as sung in French verse by Provencal troubadours, magical hero-stories exiled to Brittany (Little Britain) with Celtic Britons fleeing through Cornwall as the Saxons conquered the West, given a shining armour polish by the Normans, a brilliant gloss of French romance and courtly love and spreading across the North of Europe (and into Spain).  And that's before we even get to the later Arab enchantments, new learning and flying dragons absorbed as the Christians embarked on the Crusades and those twin propaganda campaigns, the Norman Conquest's identification with the Saxon-subduing Celtic knights of old followed by Henry VIII's repeat of the same, both to legitimise a new Britain using the old Matter.

"Lady Guinevere" was first published in 'Schools Poetry Review' in the late 80s and then in my first volume of poems "Coming Home" in 1991 along with an alternative Welsh-metered Dark Age/ Celtic mythological "Gwenhwyfar" the twinned poems evident love of all things Arthurian earning me an invitation by elegant formal letter to a British order of Arthurians which I was too wary to take up. I subsequently extended the sequence into a book of verse called "The Lost Land" which I learned by heart and performed as a one man show (Arthur; Britain's Making") - using masks and English, Welsh and Scottish flags - at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2011. Not to mention an epic school play "Jennifer's Gwenhwyfar" - epic in every way, cast of 70, 2 hours long, produced by 3 different directors in 3 different local schools, published by a teacher's training college, workshopped in class and with youth theatre groups, still rewriting it for various remakings 30 years later...

The audio link  https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/lady-guinevere is to the version of "Guinevere" which will appear on our Peacock's Tale folk indie duo's forthcoming album of "The Lost Land" and opts for our remit of 'traditional' tale with 'contemporary' beat.

Lady Guinevere

Belle ami, si est de nous, ne vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous.

Let them play at boyish games round
A table. Though walled up, bound,
In an unpublished garden, stone
Tower with window, all alone,
This court still revolves around me.
I twist them all round my pretty
Little finger, a studded ring:
The champion knight, the poor king,
Modred, Gawain, my Lancelot.
It’s the only power I know.

He comes through enchanted forests,
Rough-horses, haunted castles, mists;
From slaying giants, big bad knights:
Barons with feudal appetites;
Impossible quests for Our Lady,
Sowing wild seeds Love meant for me;
Obsessed so with courtly sin and
Confession – Indulgence’s twin;
Greets Artos, old friend – clash of mail 
(So grieved his crown still lacks a graal,
So tedious!) He comes to me  

Who waits… and do not wait to see  
The object of his worship pass,
Wasted, into this looking glass,
Wheat-hair, rose-lips, unsown, should he
Choose to deny himself – and me.

I have a heart, self-determined
Core of I Am, God-underpinned,
Won on the Cross, for me. It can
Choose a beloved, a ‘husband’
The church would make him. But marriage
On earth’s not as it is (a rich
Royal land transaction) as one
With my Lancelot – in heaven.) 

lyrics

Crazy Man Michael

Listen, listen

In Quest of the Holiday Grail

Fill Your Head With Seaside Rock

https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/fill-your-head-with-seaside-rock-ep

Bring Me To Fring All Saints

When I Was On Horseback

Midsomer Dawn 2

The Ballad of Kett's Rebellion

Adieu False Heart music video by Peacock's Tale

From our EP

https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/four-points-of-departure

The Death of Edith Cavell music video by Peacock's Tale

There was a film of this story on TV in my very early childhood and it really stuck because it was the first I saw that didn't end happily. (Most war films then had been very upbeat in their emphasis - or else I had been sent to bed if they weren't). I researched it many years later for my Poppyland 'Doin Different' book of new folk ballads (and use the excellent illustrated pages in this video, complete with the tune we worked out) and now believe Edith's story goes beyond sad/happy into a triumph of humanity. (Though my 8 year old self will always wish she got away in the final reel)

From our EP https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/four-points-of-departure

The Waking Hour music video by Peacock's Tale

From our EP

https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/four-points-of-departure

The Bald Grenadier music video by Peacock's Tale

The Ballad of Susan Nobes (A True Story)

The May King (Anyone for Tennyson?)

Colonel Mustard's Backword

Transatlantic Arti (studio version)

For The Soul of England (Hereward the Wake )

Bring Me A Boat (Kate Rusty)

 

 A female shanty perhaps.

Leila and Majnun

Transatlantic Arti (making the track)

Come Together

One of countless 'underground' Beatles tracks (typically on the B side of the agile or the final track of the side of the albums) that too-cool-for-school listeners don't seem to have heard when they dismiss the Beatles as 'merely' a very good pop band. Did the genuinely and studiedly cool and groundbreaking (and at times quite poppy albeit with an edge one a Pale Blue Eyes=Dear Prudence sort of way) Velvet Underground make anything even in 1967 that was more 'underground' than 'Walrus' and 'Strawberry Fields' in that iconoclastic year or 'Rain' and 'Tomorrow Never Knows' the year before or even 'Ticket To Ride' (which was an 'A' side number one single AS WELL) the year before that? And I'm not even going to mention 'Revolution 9' (or 'The Inner Light') in '1968. Just because 'Come Together' is lifted into rock heaven by McCartney's stunning and intricate bass part doesn't make it any 'underground' 'progressive' or 'experimental.' It (and all these others mentioned) just rocks its way into the ear of everyman and woman as well as the dilettantes.
Lyrically, 'Come Together' is daringly new - and I would even use the F word (feminism) in the traditionally macho sex-objectifying world ofrocknroll.

On the subject of which, Lennon's lifelong weakness for naughty boy sexual innuendo in his lyrics - from 'Please Please Me' through 'I'll Get You ( In The End)' and 'A Hard Day's Night' to 'Come Together' (where it, is it were, grows up and comes out with it) was possibly at work in the original title of the track that dominated Side 2 of 'Abbey Road' which was originally known as 'The Big One'. Rather beautifully, these innuendos are never single entendres as they tend to be with Stones lyrics but contribute an earthing giggle out of the side of a heavenly kiss in the total effect of a Beatles record. It would be perverse and reductive to insist on them but it is funny in a boyish sort of way, part of their subversiveness and refusal quite to be squeaky clean National Treasures. (like getting stoned in the Buckingham Palace toilets before receiving their MBSEs).

Here all that grows up into a very Sixties celebration of a consummation in which the love object is no longer separate and 'other' as in a conventional pop song but merges with the love subject in a revolutionary union. Our take was never likely to challenge the glorious perfection of the original but its author would hopefully approve this male/ female fusion/ revolutionary love anthem, sung, played and recorded after co-cooking/imbibing our Covid Christmas dinner, on 25 Dec 2020.
On the subject of which, Lennon's lifelong weakness for naughty boy sexual innuendo in his lyrics - from 'Please Please Me' through 'I'll Get You ( In The End)' and 'A Hard Day's Night' to 'Come Together' (where it, is it were, grows up and comes out with it) was possibly at work in the original title of the track that dominated Side 2 of 'Abbey Road' which was originally known as 'The Big One'. Rather beautifully, these innuendos are never single entendres as they tend to be with Stones lyrics but contribute an earthing giggle out of the side of a heavenly kiss in the total effect of a Beatles record. It would be perverse and reductive to insist on them but it is funny in a boyish sort of way, part of their subversiveness and refusal quite to be squeaky clean National Treasures. (like getting stoned in the Buckingham Palace toilets before receiving their MBSEs).
Here all that grows up into a very Sixties celebration of a consummation in which the love object is no longer separate and 'other' as in a conventional pop song but merges with the love subject in a revolutionary union. Our take was never likely to challenge the glorious perfection of the original but its author would hopefully approve this male/ female fusion/ revolutionary love anthem, sung, played and recorded after co-cooking/imbibing our Covid Christmas dinner, on 25 Dec 2020.  
lyrics
Here come old flat top
He come grooving up slowly
He got joo joo eyeball
He one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker he just do what he please
He wear no shoe shine
He got toe jam football
He got monkey finger
He shoot Coca-Cola
He say I know you, you know me
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together, right now, over me
He bag production
He got walrus gumboot
He got Ono sideboard
He one spinal cracker
He got feet down below his knee
Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease
Come together, right now, over me
He roller coaster
He got early warning
He got muddy water
He one mojo filter
He say, "one and one and one is three"
Got to be good looking 'cause he's so hard to see
Come together, right now, over me
Oh
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
Oh
Come together, yeah
Come together, yeah
credits
from It Was 60 Years Ago Today, track released January 1, 2021 

Lennon/McCartney

license

I Want To Hold Your Hand To The End Of Abbey Road by Peacock's Tale folk indie duo

Ticket To Ride

I Am The Walrus

All You Need Is Love

It Was 60 Years Ago Today ( Beatles celebration)

To mark the 60th anniversary of the Fabs making their landmark debut LP in 24 hours (Feb 11 1963) Peacock’s Tale old married woke folk indie duo have made a 14 track EP of Beatles stories, covers and pastiches charting that real life rags to riches fairy story 1960-1970 and its impact on Factory girl Cindy. “It Was 60 Years Ago Today.” https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/it-was-60-years-ago-today-ep 

Essentially it's a 60s kitchen sink magical-realist rags to riches real life fairytale in which Factory Girl (expelled from Grammar School at 14) Cindy gets to the Beatle Ball (a ticket to ride, leaving home, getting the word Love, going to India etc). 

 The gay colours; the sumptuous costumes; the irreverent majesty. The moment Cinders got to the ball and became Lucy. In the Sky. With Diamonds. The moment khaki became satin; Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali; Van became the Man; frogs became princes; pumpkins turned to bubble cars; guitars became wands; school became art school; Satan became Santa; guns became flowers; the artisan became the artist; George Eastham became George Best; the Black GI wielding his Master’s axe became Jimi Hendrix; the Stone Age came in colours; Brian Epstein came as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; the Hollies became King Midas (on their way to becoming Crosby, Stills, Nash and Jung); the Wurzels became Jeff Beck; the council estate got through the generation gap in the barbed wire and up up and into the Milky Way, heading like that “they think it’s all over, it is now” Geoff Hurst counter-attack over the Gates and into Heeeeeevennnnn!. 

 ...until the 60s midnight knell tolls (At the end of Abbey Road was a crossroads. John turned left; Paul turned right; Ringo turned back and George...kept going.) A bucket of cold water over her Sixties bed. Paul’s lyrics stop meaning anything. John cuts off a decade of Beatle growth, gets a short, back and B sides, and stops being funny. England lose the World Cup. Wales never have it. Pan’s People become Legs and Co. The Stones emigrate. Legs disappear. The Mersey Sound and the Internationale become Standard English and National Service. Jesus Christ Superstar becomes Andrew Lloyd Weber. 

Johnny went West. And Cindy went East. And maybe she is still there. Will her baby brother James, armed with her old copy of 'Pepper' clutched like a Cinderella slipper, be able to find her again?

 This YouTube of one of the tracks (She’s Leaving Home) is proving popular. https://youtu.be/Z9p9tpucPnc

News story https://townandaround.net/previous-issue/February-2023/mobile/index.html  (page 10)