It's not often that a song imposes itself on your conciousness before you've heard it. We'd been hearing murmurings of 'manifestations' for days in Switzerland. We'd been away from the UK for seven weeks so were a little out of touch. One flick through a Swiss-English phrase book enlightened us to the English transaltion of 'manifestation'. No, not ghost. Riot! That delicious word. We were up for it, ready like all true British patriots to give Thatcher a bloody nose! Unfortunately we had to go to Austria first to meet up with the family. It was there we got the full story, that riots had erupted all over the country. Sister Alison said the best thing was that the Specials had a record at number one that was brilliant and matched the mood of the country. So our first listen of 'Ghost Town' (or Ville des Manifestations in Swiss) was in prose format. It made us homesick, so we couldn't wait to get back, doing the trip back in one go, via Leysin as Jeff had met Chantal and wanted one quick last trans-Europe shag.
As we approached the white cliffs of Newhaven we expected to see buildings in flames and coppers with bloody noses, but sadly we'd missed the riots by a couple of days.
But we did at last get to hear 'Ghost Town' and it was every bit as good as Alison had tried to explain back in Mayrhofen a week earlier.
1 comment:
that used to say job centre but they changed it to art centre. Gone were the vacancies to inspire you to leave the dole and get a job. In it's place the opportunity to express yourself in the medium of art.
Hmmm.
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