Got any interesting thoughts on a set of lyrics? Any that don't involve the word "indeed"? Find yourself struggling to decipher all those obtuse references Von makes? Read "1959 And All That" and still no clearer? Nope, us neither. Postcards found lying in a skip around the back of the Chemists can be found here... Don't say you weren't warned.
‘Heartland’. This is the first time every part of the music is played by, or played as written by me. If you ignore the first single, it’s as close as Andrew had come to including anybody else’s lyrics in one of our songs. The finished lyrics and over-arching theme are his but the second verse doesn’t stray too far from my initial draft – somehow that still adds up to it being the most of me you get on any Sisters song, (until ‘Poison Door’.)
Allowing for possible mis-remembering 40 years later (although Gary is normally very reliable), I'd say that settles it - Driver is a Marx song.
If I told them once, I told them a hundred times to put 'Spinal Tap' first and 'Puppet Show' last.
Has to be Marx. Eldritch couldn’t drive so wouldn’t get the sensations the driver did.
HL was apparently brought about by an ambulance trip after too much speed, hence leaving white lines far behind. So perhaps Driver morphed into HL before Eldritch sang it, became HL proper.
Lay me down the long white line
Leave the sirens far behind me
Call me weak and call me frightened
Follow me when the sun goes down
We will fly the public highway
We will wind the windows down
Call me at the magic hour
When the marvels run to ground
Reason used to see the power
While the wheels go wheeling round and round...
Life is short and life is cruel
But we have here and we have fuel
We are never coming down
Dress the creature up in glass
Lines across the middle and the
House is wasted, ever faster
Rushing through the shame and shadow
While the pleasure flashes past
The sound that fills the big black car
A thousand drum bursts
We should have a celebration
We are never coming down
We will live forever while
The wheels go wheelings round and round...
Call me weak and call me frightened
Follow me when the sun goes down
We will fly along the highway
We will wind the windows down
Call me at the magic hour
When the marvel runs to ground
Reason used to see the power
While the wheels go wheeling round and round...
As Gary is laying claim to the second verse of the Heartland lyrics, and given that the opening lines of both songs are the same, surely this proves that it is an Eldritch lyric.
I covered this issue in a blog post about the song a few years back:
"The song Heartland credits Eldritch and Marx as its composers, and Marx stated in the 2003 Prémonition interview that he wrote the music and “some of the lyrics” to Heartland. This has led to speculation that the Driver lyric is in fact Marx’s, but it is surely much more plausible that Eldritch “tidied up” Marx's original lyric for Heartland by borrowing the opening couplet from his (Eldritch's) own lyric for Driver. This theory is strengthened by the fact that some of the other lyrics of Driver made it into future songs: “Life is short” features in Temple of Love, and its follow-on line in Driver “[life] is cruel” is a key tenet in Some Kind of Stranger, whilst “Wheels go wheeling round” is redolent of “Wheels are spinning round” in Driven Like The Snow, and the Americanism “highway” resurfaces regularly in yet another song “Black Planet”. Eldritch has publicly said (primarily during interviews around the time of the release of the compilation Some Girls Wander By Mistake) that he looks on many early tracks as embarrassing “baby photos”, but some of the lines - “We have fear and we have fuel” for example and in particular “Call me weird but call me Friday” - are very much of the standard of Richard Butler-esque wordplay that he engaged in for future releases, whilst “The sound that fills the big black cars Is ours, the drum machines and fast guitars” is such an accurate prediction of life in Leeds in the mid/late 80s that I originally assumed that this song was a latter-day Weird Al Jankovic style hoax. It is also however an almost direct quote from an American radio interview in September 1983, when Eldritch says "It just so happens that all the people we know in West Yorkshire are using drum machines and the occasional fast guitar," further evidence of the lyricist's identity."
As for the unclear verse lyrically, I would still go with PiB's Hunter S Thompson "amphetamine logic" reading:
"Life is short and life is cruel,
But we have Fear and we have fuel. (does this last word refer to amphetamine as well as gasoline? Fear referring to the book?)
We are never coming down,
Trace the future on this glass (lines of speed on a mirror?)
Lines across the mirror/middle (same image repeated, with the road analogy again)
And the house is wasted/pulses racing ever faster"
Isn't that "ethics yield to speed and power" totally an Andrew thing too? Like futurism, and he wrote about driving before he could do it at least in Black Planet
and wow I thought I heard all sisters songs by now but I had no idea this exists
