Once - The Original Sleeve Notes

Manual (1990 Sleeve notes)

I just had a few friends in. It was ok. A few laughs, a few reflections, and a decent time. And all of it logged hereabouts. Making records has got to be emotionally rewarding. Turning it into a marketing exercise is worthless and boring. I've revisited some of my old haunts and been refreshed. I wanted to call the record 'Once' because I think that the most important thing to remember daily, hourly, minutely, is that these moments, now, are but once. They will never return. When your life is over, it is just that. No real reason for much sadness if it has been reasonably fulfilled. Treasure it now, along with everyone else's. The so-called 'moral high ground' should not always automatically be understood to be with those who 'go to church'. We all 'go to church' in our own ways. Every time I look at a sparrow, I'm in church'.

I'd like to ask a couple of questions. Are we going to live in a world where we can expect 'give and take' to play a central role in our everyday experience? Or are we going to continue to watch the gross spectacle of fascist megalomania in all its guises, continue to fester, whilst at the same time governing large expanses of humanity? I am tired of breathing the same air as politics that condemn the poor, exploit the dispossessed and mindlessly pollute all they touch. I don't want to be part of that any more. Do any of us? It's about time that we all stood up and were seen. I am for 100% consensus, or nothing. Systems are not gods. Most needed to be changed. Yesterday.

'If' 'Winds Of Change'. Nowhere To Run To', The Black Cloud Of Islam', ' Once', 'Ghost Dance' and 'Berliners' are all relevant to this theme, these thoughts. Tomorrow is too late. It would be better to be a poet, and to engage people's minds, but sometimes being a warrior is not entirely unimportant. One problem in so being is believing that you are dying for the 'right cause'. That people die in such circumstances at all is a bigger one.

Fascist torture chambers such as Iraq and authoritarian theme parks like South Africa and China, where the victims' families are charged for the price of the bullet that went through a relative's head, should be ostracised by the world community, together with repressively over-zealous Islamic fundamentalism. They are all prejudicial, and as such, worse than meaningless in the quest for justice.

'The Black Cloud Of Islam' has been well over a decade in the fermentation. I can remember alluding to the eminent historian V. Gordon-Childe in some literature of mine a good ten years ago. I can't remember where it was now, but the following has stayed with me from the day I read it to this. In 1941, in his tremendous little book 'What happened in history', Gordon-Childe quoted an earlier source thus: 'The establishment of the Orthodox Faith about 1106 sealed forever the fate of independent research in Islam', Another half century later and the situation can be said to have deteriorated somewhat. Is this possible?

There have been many times when I have told myself that I should not be interfering in political or religious matters that do not pertain directly to my own culture. My own understanding. After a decade of Khomeni and Co. these reproaches have finally been forgotten. It is my belief that if the idle-eastern states who are hard-line Islamic were economically more powerful, and continued to give credence to the same attitudes that they hold at present, then some kind of a religious or ideology war would be tearing the world apart at this moment in time. I have asked myself many times whether this song can in any way be construed as racist, as that would be the last thing I should ever want it to be. It isn't.

Religion in this shape and form is to be absolutely deplored. It is poison of the worst kind. It is mental poison. It is armed superstition. It is potential danger to the human world the like of which can only be compared to that in which this world found itself endangered in 1939. The same forces of mass mania and repression are obvious for all to see. Fuses for use in nuclear weapons being smuggled from the UK into the middle east at the time of writing this only reinforces this view. The only ideology worth upholding is one which preserves all rights and all life on the planet. (This would include the human female's right to her own body).

This song nearly didn't get made public because I thought that in some way I was bound to offend Salman Rushdie. To somehow detract from the obvious scholarship of his book, The Satanic Verses. It is not, in the words of the song, that Salman 'Is right', but that anyone who wants to injure him, (or anyone who wishes to attack the ideal of freedom of thought), in any way at all, is definitely wrong. I also had doubts because anything that influences those people against setting free their hostages has to be carefully considered, but they have shown their true colours too often now. They are merciless criminals without dignity who kill for the sake of killing and cannot be trusted under any circumstances. And so finally I had to put the song on this record because it belongs to a world which deplores murdering children in mid-air in the name of 'god'.

It also belongs to a world that owes a debt to journalists who are murdered in the pursuance of bringing that which they think of as important into the public domain. It also belongs to a world in which those who are guilty of not upholding basic human rights should be despised. I hope that Salman Rushdie will forgive me for wanting to use his name as a new figure of speech in the fight against oppression, as in other senses one would use 'gerrymander' or 'quisling'. I would like it to have a far more positive connotation than either of these. We live in hope. 'Berliners' is intended as a half-century tribute to the men and women of all nations who gave their all to rid us of the European civil wars. There are bound to be a few hiccups yet, but 1989 marked not only the fiftieth anniversary of the conflict but also a great demolition of most of the barriers that the European conflicts had erected, and hopefully a peaceful passage from those dark times into a brighter future.

Incidentally, 'Berliners' is the original demo. I didn't think that it was of any value to structure it more than this; and the one time we tried to, it tended not to sound as dynamic as the demo. I quickly resolved to use the original, bad guitar sound and all, because it was more about the original inspiration. The song is dedicated to two particular members of my Grandfather's generation, Bill and Archie. (Veterans of WW1, one badly wounded, the other blown to pieces with his brother yards away).

'Ghost Dance is a tongue in cheek reminder about the ways societies usually react when threatened with crises or extinction. The invention of, or absolute submission to some kind of god is nearly always top of the list. The Paiute's was fairly benign, Khomeni's and Hitler's were belligerent, our own is a particularly arrogant blind monetary faith which has been discoed and head-banged out in 'Tramps', 'Annabelle's' and the Hammersmith Odeon for the last couple of aeons.

The Ghost Dances 'arose from the northern Paiute prophet dreamers in western Nevada who announced the imminent return of the dead (hence "ghost"), the ousting of the whites, and the restoration of Indian lands, food supplies and way of life. These ends, it was believed, would be hastened by the dances and songs revealed to the prophets in their vision visits to the spirit world… 'Many dancers fell into trances and received new songs from the dead they met in visions or were healed by Ghost Dance rituals. The first Ghost Dance developed in 1889 around the dreamer Wodziwob (died c. 1872) …Early in 1890 it reached the Sioux and coincided with the rise of the Sioux outbreak of late 1890, for which the cult was wrongly blamed. This outbreak culminated in the massacre at Wounded Knee, S.D., where the "ghost shirts" failed to protect their wearers, as promised b Wovoka.'

I didn't want to send any of these songs to any of the major record companies. My mind would have been clouded by them. These corporations are too pervasive. They tend to dilute substance while strengthening pap. Whether this record is perceived to fall into either category matters less than that the decisions made on it all had to be my own. I was becoming increasingly hard to reconcile myself to being part of this business. It still is. Certain publications will not be getting a free copy of this record. In the name of real progress it is about time that considerably more people respected some of the things that they get for free. This can start with a better appreciation of the planet. And work its way slowly down to Terry Cooke, me, and Steve Broughton. Now we're not entirely free, well not to any old tom, dick, or harry, but we're aiming to try to be. Is that true Harry?