Chemical warfare

I wrote this song in April 1982. I think I first read some pamphlets about chemical warfare as a spin-off from browsing in left-wing bookshops for critical material on nuclear warfare. There is no comfort in this song. It speaks of the English government's long involvement in this sort of thing through science at Porton Down. It mentions the secrecy surrounding chemical weapons and their effects. One verse deals with the physiological response to nerve gas, another with the use of toxic defoliants in Vietnam. And, of course, there had to be something about tear gas and that sort of thing. Special clothing and antidote pills may be manufactured for soldiers and the like but ordinary folks would be unlikely to have access to these. Having said that, who knows whether either the clothing or the antidotes will be effective in practice?

I remember singing this song at the end of the night at the Glebe Live Music club in Sunderland, the evening the Gulf war started. I had written an additional verse that mentioned President Bush (Senior) and John Major. It was one of the few occasions in my whole time as a performer when you could literally have heard a pin drop: the audience were rapt and the song spoke to the moment. Then I packed up my guitar and said goodnight to everyone. When I got home I turned on BBC TV and instantly heard John Simpson speaking from his hotel. This was his famous report in which he described the way guided missiles were shooting down the street outside his window, en route to their targets. It was an eerie conclusion to the evening.

Musically, I was pleased with the arrangement I made on the 1982 album. I layered about three guitar parts onto the track. I was going for a very sweet, gentle, almost tinkling effect on the guitar. I wanted the sound to act as a stark contrast to the horror of the lyric.

I remember that I couldn't afford much studio time and so I had practiced the separate parts endlessly using an old reel-to-reel tape recorder (I think it was an Akai). As a result of this, I was able to lay the guitar tracks down very quickly with virtually no retakes when I came to record the song. I do think that playing live and solo regularly in the acoustic music pub scene helped a lot in that regard. It certainly made recording much less expensive.

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