OK, if only to distract attention from arguments about “elms” and “alms”, let’s have another one which is going to encourage some wild speculation. Children of Apocalyptic Techstep is one of those songs where the guitar is occasionally just a bit too forward in the mix for the lyrics analysts. Odd song this, even the hmhb site doesn’t have too much to say about it. Thanks to Peter
See lyrics to Children of Apocalyptic Techstep
Fredorrarci
“Come on, come on, begone, futon, begone!”
“I, I, I, I, I will always hate them” (as in the inverse of that bloody Whitney Houston song which I imagine is a common funeral ditty).
2 October 2008
Peter Gandy
Fredorrarci,
Agree completely with your additions. Just listened again and couldn’t believe how I missed them.
Assuming no alterations to the other lyrics, I make that only one word missing.
2 October 2008
Peter Gandy
Only one word to go; how about “beyond the throng of Eastern sages lies a stream”?
2 October 2008
Hoagy
I agree with Fredorrarci aswell and is it
“Beyond the brook of eastern sages lies a stream”
4 October 2008
Chris The Siteowner
Yep, those’ll do for me, although as ever, your mileage may vary, and other lyrics are available.
4 October 2008
Tangerine Wizard.
I always thought it was the forty-third road sign today rather than the forty third brown sign today. Anyone else agree?
4 June 2012
WALKLEYBLADE
Might I humbly suggest: “The fourteenth fairground sign today…”?
Of the various brown UK “tourist” road signs, the ones used to designate theme parks include a picture of woodland and a carousel, as seen here. I think it scans ever so slightly better. Have another listen and see what you think…
1 May 2013
ACIDIC REGULATOR
@Walkleyblade, seconded. (Voting for “fairground” over “furground”, but the principle’s the same.)
30 May 2013
Justmark
Well, I’m pretty sure I can here a gap between “forty” and “third”. It wouldn’t be there with the “fourteenth” option.
31 May 2013
Buck Tarbrush
I always thought I detected a tiny aspirated ‘as’ in the lines about the funeral. Nigel hates people who insist on ‘jolly’ funerals so he’s asking:
‘A growing trend for people nowadays to say:
“Don’t let my funeral be morose in any way.”
As I,I,I,I,I will always hate them
I ask you now, please “Rock of Ages, cleft for me”‘.
Rock of Ages, of course being Toplady’s grand old hymn from the late 18th century – the only hymn that the congregation ever seem to be singing in any film or TV scene set in a chapel in the mid-West US during the Depression – that Nigel wants to inflict on those scattered around the crem wearing “bright colours please, no black!!!”.
I don’t think it is a particularly bleak hymn compared to the work of some of Toplady’s contemporaries (such as William Cowper, who seemed to spend all of his life in a state of depression in his bedroom) but such hymns were supposed to comfort those near death and not those left behind. Either way, it’s no “Shine, Jesus Shine”.
Also it’s “barbecue”, not “barbeque”, although I notice Tesco seem to have long given up on the correct spelling.
23 October 2013
EXXO
I’ve always assumed it was the hint of an ‘and’ from the Whitney Houston line mentioned above, half a decade ago. Or maybe he went for Whitney’s ‘and’ and ended up as you hear it with an ‘as’? We know from other confirmed examples that HMHB aren’t perfectionists during such moments of the recording process. I can’t listen now to check (anyone?).
Otherwise yes, you negotiate the path most-likely-to-be-trodden through the two ambiguities of the verse:
(i) does he hate those people, those type of funerals, or _all_ funerals?
(ii) is he saying “tsk, I ask you, ‘Rock of Ages’, what a crap choice”, or “let me put it on record now I want ‘Rock of Ages’ at my funeral.”
I dunno about the first one really, but yeah I do agree with you on the latter. But don’t forget ‘he’ is just an amusing character voice, who may or may not reflect the writer’s views.
By the way old hymns have by law to contain lines which we find may risible today, and I reckon the lines from that hymn:
“foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Savior, or I die.”
should be printed on the under-shirt of some particularly notorious-but-born-again Brazilian footballer, for revelation not after scoring but when sent off and on the way to the showers.
23 October 2013
toastkid
EXXO – or, option iii) –
As the lyrics to “Rock of Ages” go “Rock of ages, cleft for me, I want to hide myself in thee”, when Nigel references the song he’s saying that he wants the rock to cleft for him so he can hide himself in it, to escape from the people who say they don’t want their funeral to be morose.
That’s how i always interpreted it.
23 October 2013
dirk hofman
I’m agreeing with Toastkid that he wants the ROA to ‘cleft for me’,in the lower case.The ‘eastern sages’ are mentioned in Brewer and Stanley’s ‘Cornish’ carol-‘Lo!The Eastern Sages Rise’ meaning the three wise men or magi of the nativity.(Are they stars in the sky?he asks reaching for the Golden Boff on the passenger seat).Ok,i only hear five ‘come on’ before ‘begone,futon,begone’.I feel the bridleway has led her a bit further than over there, so capitalisation for the ‘He who rules the roost..’?.
13 December 2014
dickhead in quicksand
I second TK and DH: Rock of Ages, cleft for me; with the comma. (It has already been cloven, though it’s not clear when or by whom.)
@@Exxo, imao the metaphysicals could mix metaphors somewhat better than the spendidly-named Augustus Montague Toplady. I read the fountain as Christ’s “riven side”.
I propose “waterwheel”, one word; that’s what the 2005 ODoE has.
13 December 2014
Dr Desperate
‘Cleft’ is the past participle of the verb ‘to cleave’ (as is ‘cloven’), which limits the possible interpretations of the line. I’d keep it as in the hymn, “Rock of Ages, cleft for me.”
It’s always possible there’s a reference here to the best live album of all time, The Band’s ‘Rock of Ages’ (though probably not to the Def Leppard song, nor to 2009 jukebox musical, which included ‘We Built This City’ and songs by Styx and Journey, and won the first Golden Mullet award on Broadway).
15 December 2014
EXXO
This hymn is the muddled, egocentric product of a slightly deranged mind, says Rupert Christiansen in his slim volume ‘A Book of Classic Hymns and Carols’:
“A hymn “strangely unlike any other”, thought Percy Dearmer, and one that is certainly a muddle of images and excessively egocentric in its self-flagellation and abnegation – perhaps because it was the product of a slightly deranged mind. Augustus Montague Toplady (1740-78) was “fanatical in a gross Calvinism, and most difficult to deal with”.
Minister of the French Reformed church in Soho, he engaged in aggressive pamphleteering and character-assassination (one of his victims, John Wesley, wisely decided that he was “too dirty a writer for me to deal with”). Perhaps the tuberculosis which eventually killed him had something to do with it.
In 1776, he wrote a batty but oddly compelling article for The Gospel Magazine, in which he compared a rocketing National Debt, which could never be paid off, to the extent of human sinfulness.
The mathematics of this would overwhelm even a quantum physicist: we sin “every second of our sublunary duration”, he said, and “our dreadful account stands as follows… At 10 years old, each of us is chargeable with 315 millions and 360 thousand sins. At 20, with 630 millions and 720 thousand” – ascending by degrees until at 80, the total comes to “2,522 millions and 880 thousand”.
But salvation is at hand: ‘Christ hath redeemed us from the curse… this, this will not only counter-balance but infinitely over-balance, All the sins of the Whole believing world.” At the conclusion, he published the hymn, with a heading “A living and dying Prayer for the Holiest Believer in the world.”
There’s an unsubstantiated tale that Toplady wrote Rock of Ages on the back of a playing card when taking refuge during a storm in a cleft rock in a gorge in the Mendip Hills in Somerset – a plaque in Burrington Combe marks the spot.
But there were many uses of the basic image in the Bible to inspire him, notably Numbers 20:11, where Moses smites a rock in the wilderness and water pours forth, various passages in Isaiah, and I Corinthians 10:4, where Paul speaks of believers who “drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ”.
Oliver Wendell Holmes called Rock of Ages the “Protestant Dies irae?”, so thunderous was its rhetoric, and its stern tone appealed more to the Victorians than it does to us. Prince Albert is said to have murmured it deliriously on his deathbed; Gladstone not only translated it into Latin and Greek but also commanded it for his funeral.
Any relation to the song of the same name by Def Leppard – “still rollin’, rocknrollin” – is purely tangential.
The tune is Petra, by Richard Redhead (but not named after the Blue Peter dog of that name)
15 December 2014
Gerry Gow
πέτρα or in Roman letters Petra is, of course, the Greek for stone or rock.
15 December 2014
EXXO
And of course the ancient rock-hewn city of Petra in Jordan (as recently visited by Mrs. Exford before a football tour in Palestine) claims to be the site of Moses’ rock-cleaving.
15 December 2014
Dr Desperate
Ah, Petra, “rose-red city half as old as time” (not “half as Golders Green”, as Frank Muir parodied it for Peter Sellers in ‘Bal Ham, Gateway to the South’).
15 December 2014
dickhead in quicksand
“O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.” Song 2:14
Toplady’s peccatometer must have been near overload whenever he read that. I calculate an average of 3.6 sins/hour (ignoring leap years) – based on personal experience, perhaps? I can see why he thought Salvation by Works might not help him much (“Not the labour of my hands, can fulfill Thy law’s demands“).
15 December 2014