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PROTEST SINGER
DATSON WORDS and MUSIC © Geoffrey Datson 2002 PRODUCER Geoffrey Datson ART RECORDS REVIEW JUICE July 2002 In a world where every corner has been explored, globalised and fucked up, , the internet remains the last wilderness, a wild place where the frontier is getting further away from us rather than closer. And its on the internet that today's folk scene is thriving. Not the "folk" of traditional instruments and styles, but instead in the sense of home-made, uncompromising and free from commercial ambition. In this way, Geoffrey Datson is a folk singer. Datson has done his time in the conventional recording industry with the Surf Side 6 and Samurai Trash. He's now concentrating on music distributed via the web and his legendary warehouse parties. After the industrial grooves of last year's Star of Heart, the more acoustic based Protest Singer is a departure; it's stripped down immediacy and socially concerned lyrics apparently a reaction to the Howard government's brutal treatment of refugees. The latter are not addressed directly, but form the inspiration behind songs like "Planet" and "Back up the Car". While acoustic instruments are prominent, Datson is more than a singer-songwriter with a battered six-string. "Co-deependent Cowboy" makes constant and amusing use of samples which are almost as funny as the lyrics. "Ruin House" and "Spawn" are still raw, but musically closer to Brian Eno or Kraftwerk than Billy Brag. Pushing the envelope further, a mesmerising secret track is built around samples of Winston Churchill's war speeches, with telling implications for our times. Datson makes music with all the rough edges left in, the emphasis on inspiration and to hell with the rules. In other words, music as music was originally dreamed of. David Messer rated 8 REVIEW HQ Magazine June 2002 "Playing with old styles is a self-titled album from Protest Singer (Stickylabel). Mostly just recorded with voice and guitar, the album in part harks back to something Alan Lomax might have captured and elsewhere toys with beats or recalls the deadpan experiments of the Velvet Underground. The lyrics generally protest the state of the world; "Y2K Buggin'" is a litany of global irritations from Milosevic to big hair. On "Ruin House" political theory crashes against the personal and the poetic. Throughout the eight tracks there's a harking back to Biblical language and the mythology of the ancient world juxtaposed with crappy cars and the detritus of the inner city life. Protest Singer doesn't have pat answers or prescriptions but draws connections through the ages to man's inhumanity." Toby Creswell PROTEST SINGER LIVE PERFORMANCES 2002 Mayday, Album launch Stickylabel Warehouse 2002 September 11, Massive stock take event Stickylabel Warhouse 2003 March 8, NSW Autumn Writer's Festival 2003 March 11, interviewed on ABC Radio National's The Deep End Program 2003 March 19, Silicon Woman Art=Music=Arc=Atom, The Arthouse Hotel, Sydney 2003 April, Good Friday, The Truth is Not For Sale, Stickylabel Warehouse 2006 Random Acts of Poetry, Wordjammin @ The Brisbane Writers Festival LINER NOTES 1. Planet Originally written in NY 1987 has been through a few incarnations. This one is the 1992 version. My mother recently said she used to lullaby me with the League of Nations anthem which she learnt at The Friends School (Quaker) in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. I suspect the sentiment is not dissimilar. Do you ever eat too fast? I do, love’s like that In the city, summertime your heart goes out naive and cool Are you angry and afraid? I can confess to that Do you look at the mess we’ve made hope to ever learn from it? Don’t despair people united under hope helping hand, emotions mute we’re washed in each-other’s blood. It’s not wrong to pray for those things that your brothers and sisters might need but if they take too much you’re going to have to fight, there’s no room for greed Without money, you’ve got faith think once and get it right It’s OK, we’re all possessed of ideas and dead mythology Don’t despair people united under hope This stuff we spill is just the living breath of earth 2. Back up the car. 1999. Inspired by a film set in central Australia where a couple move in together, the girl backs her ute loaded with possessions across the compound at the start of a marriage which soon unravels. My parents lived at the end of a dirt track with no turning circle. Many unsuspecting sightseers did the long reverse. It's for everybody who's found things didn't turn out as expected and is dedicated to refugees in detention centres. I apologise for our governments' behaviour. It is not our will. Let the sun go down on your last regret Forty years wrong on a barbed wire fence Feeling it over pack up your books and clothes Back up the car, you took the wrong road Easy forgiven, empty the whispering wire I watched you two burn Beat into ploughshears the hammer and sickle of song Get out of town you don’t belong Swearing that day from deep in your heart As they made you, so you’re a part of them Try not believing when you’re leaving, it’s the wrong time You might change their hearts, but never their minds I know, mistaken as I often am With plenty of time and too many plans Let the sun go down on your last regret Forty years wrong on a barbed wire fence Feeling it over, pack up your books and clothes Back up the car you took the wrong road 3. Shelf life. Series of vignettes from out the warehouse eyes. It was a long still evening and these events passed by the street below. A flying wedge of Goths on the way to a nightclub. Then to an ex-prime minister's daughter at a schoolboy party. The seeming indifference of our nation to the suffering of others. Maybe now I'm older cooler crueler sober Light on auto indicator turning Universe aligning, luck and hope and timing Beauty insists on sharing at my doorr Radiation finger hollow with the habit Who designs the playing of circumstantial living, this event or other sister, soldier, mother? If it is like painting, focus off the surface, so singing out of tune might sound better from a distance. Olympic youth careering, kick dancing of an evening - Celebrated groining of love longing or just loining. Supple is the secret of bushel or of bucket. I cannot draw the nose but I sure know how to blow it. Expectations grating, blips and beeps gyrating, All of our tomorrows buy plastic cards and marrow. Get some kind of ticket for stopping by the roadside, spectre of a journey like Goths in joyous hayride. Breughel was a builder developer of usage, Beliefs belie belonging sing a song shallonging. Even when you're falling lie sleeping on my sofa, Beatles just got squashed by Beethoven who rolled over. Children come to parties, I want their wild abandon - daughter of our leader; her Dad torpedoed dollar. At the seat of arcane knowledge you will find no sign of scholar. Alchemy and aggro fertilise the gardens. Babylon is hanging for the people it imprisons. By past and pith and reason your silence is a treason, I say I love you dearly won't you please crawl out my window 4. Hittites. Reprise to 1979 Boys & Girls in the Desert, which deals with the pleasures of youth. This is more the adultery of our tabloid press. For Piers Ackerman and anybody who would fund and publish such arrant nonsense. Here come the Hittites riding winged panthers behind the hill above the tree line. It doesn't look good for our salvation, asses and goats their main agenda. I get their message. It's in cuneiform with hieroglyphic footnotes . It says, start walking we got your daughter, she is with us now. Better start to bury it, all that evidence; beads and pots made for archaeologists masking a net work of telepathic mindscape. If they love us with their animals, will the gods be inclined to punish? Out on the trade routes, abandoned zigurats, civilisation contracting like amoeba dipped into acid, sudden mood reversal. Their advantage? They've got teachers, men with beards, and a coming back guarantee. 5. Co-deependent cowboy. Slim Whitman meets dimestore cowboy novella in a self-help kinda way . Dubya, you’re an idiot. I'm the co-dependent cowboy caught rustlin' in your culture I branded it with stars and stripes to doubly insult ya If I had a history, you might get where I'm coming from. Buffalo soldiers from the bedrock Odeon We got techno line dancing before campfire blanket bombing. Without injuns to be fighting, we’d be left holding nothing but a banjo, gun portfolio, from sea to shining sea. I'm the co-dependent cowboy you can deep-end on me. They were silent for a time, watching the sun turn gold and red over the marshland, then clay shook his head, gave a funny crooked grin and looked at his mother. ‘Funny, isn't it Ma?' ‘What is, son?' 'Life, the way things turn out. I've been thinking this morning, thinking a lot, and I was feeling so different, and I was trying to figure out why. Sure, I felt good after Johnnie's case ending the way it did, but there was more to it than that. It took me a long time to work out what that was.’ They were still poor, and they would still have to struggle to make ends meet, like they always would, but they were all together, and that's what counted. Their enemy had destroyed themselves, and the family were all safe. ‘But with Sym Bodie dead, and Jessie Cahoun out of the picture, I've just realised it was only them two, a mean old man and a man sick in the head, nobody else Ma, you think about it.' (excerpt from Ride a lonely Trail by Emerson Lodge, Cleveland, Sydney 1979) 6. Y2Kbuggin'. 'Love Monica, Kiss Kiss Kiss' inscription on the side of tomahawk missile 1998 Zhawar Kili camp Afghanistan (as recounted by Habib to Christopher Kremmer in Carpet Wars. Harper Collins 2002).I saw Marx and Engles riding in the rodeo power to the people going to the Easter show The president has bombed the Serbs and come back form a bitter blow Slobidan, well he should know Seismic fall or aliens abducted or just born again The ozone layer hold up the block it up, bring back big hair Thanks to the Academy, The Nimrod and the ABC Ren and scientology I'd let Harvey come on me El ninos gone it's rained all day I killed the 2K bug with spay Success has stole my velvet scooter Smoke coming from my computer Haven't worked a week in days It's hard enough just to get paid Got contractual obligations writer for United Nations Specialise in history Make it rhyme like poetry The Dali lama left to bet Moved into the TAB Che and Fergie and the Pope Diana's back, she blamed the dope The lady of Shallot is seems has ploughed up fields and put in beans The Amazon she's half on fire the unburnt part you still could buy Met a girl on internet She heeled my dog she ain't no vet The wife's returned the truck is fixed Fate has thrown a double six One more bed, a silk Pyjama One more drink there will be drama Pernod and ice, that'd be nice. As a man who writes the past I like to dabble in the arts Sing a song, see some film I feel quite well I've taken pills I know my case is much maligned You can't sue me cause I resign I saw Marx and Engels riding in the rodeo Power to the people going to the Easter show White I write it will come true you best be careful I don't write of you Liar liar pants on tighter Pinocchio and Pinochet waiting there at heaven's gate The guest list says just plus one Billy Gene, that chair is not my son. 7. Ruin House. 1987. The extracts from The Demon Lover; On the Sexuality of Terrorism. By Robin Morgan (Norton & Co 1989) were added in 1997. A hymn for the absolution of humanity. By the ruin house All the ocean is tears we are forgiven one by one - that's what it's all about Once I needed just a small amount of money Build that rock soled wall around me but where I'm coming from there's too much loss it's got to be it's got to be, got to be, got to be it's got to be it's got to be - that's what it's all about By the ruin house All the ocean is tears we are forgiven one by one - that's what it's all about 8. Spawn. Watch out! The innocents live next door to you and they are the target. .. How do you do I follow you but you follow too What'll we do with a drunken sailor? Cover him up and come back much later. I got a video that's about God, not the one that Moses had though maybe he'll come too if we take off his shoes. Sailor sailor blown away blowing back somehow some day. Why are all the people fighting? What's he doing in my garden/ I guess I never knew him, he worked in Ceaser's pizza dream, the little things we never see frozen in eternity . Spawn of god crashed in my yard, the guy from next door martyred… I follow you and you follow too Sailor sailor blown away blowing back some how some way I follow you and you follow too. And the hidden track speaks for itself. |