A bard on the wire, a voice in the wilderness, a home page for exiles trying to get home. Everybody is an exile. Maybe artists just realise it. "Like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried, in my way, to be free."
Several members of the Beatles have asked us how we came up with our name “Peacock’s Tale” ‘Did a man appear appear in a flaming pie and declare, ‘And thy name shall be Peacock’? asks one. ‘We understand why you were once called Phezant’s Tail (being the mere backing vocalists, lyricist and drummer emerging phoenix-like from the end of the Penland Phezants folk storytelling quartet) but why PEACOCK'S Tale? asks another. So we wrote this song to explain. No parrots or peacocks were harmed and no leylandii hedge was chainsaw massacred in the making of the field recordings.
Krishna always wears a peacock feather around his neck given him by the king of the peacocks in gratitude for making all his flock dance with joy. 'Neti neti' (Sanskrit, 'not this, not this') is a meditation technique for rejecting the non-divine.
Various celebrity couples are referenced: Krishna and Radha; Zeus and Hera (the Greek goddess of marriage); Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.
Argus had eyes all over his body so could see everything - hence his frequent use as a newspaper name - but he really ought to have covered them when he saw The Goddess of Marriage bathing naked. She consigned his eyes to the peacock's tail.
Agamemnon the King of Argos sacrificed his and Clytemnestra's daughter to the gods for a fair wind to Troy and, though he eventually won the war and returned home in gory, he rather lost his wife. Welcome home, dear...
lyrics
Haunted Middle English suburban castle leylandii battlements TIPSY half cut LAWNS concealing parrots concealing peacocks....
Not this luscent fan
Of massed sunrise
With its strutting mail
Of blinkless eyes.
Not this Argos fake news
That our daughters must die
For a West to burn down
An Eastern sky
Not this parrotry perched
In Love's poetry
A deaf world applauds
Nor this fame miscalled
Immortality
Immortality.
This unheard dance
Of the peacock’s heart
Is our joyous love
And our secret art.
Not this heaven train lost
Up a Khuber pass
Not this gold and blue vision
Lost up its ass.
Not this marriage vow caught
In the All Together
Nor this false ‘I’ blind
To the blaze around Krishna.
Not this parrotry perched
In Love’s poetry
A deaf world applauds
Nor this fame miscalled
Immortality
Immortality.
This unheard dance
Of the peacock’s heart
Is our joyous love
And our secret art.
