Food for thought

I wrote this song in March, 1985. This was after Michael Buerk's BBC documentary on the Ethopian famine in October 1984 and Band Aid's hit single 'Do they know it's Christmas' but before the Live Aid concert in July, 1985. At the time I was involved in running the Glebe Live Music Club in Sunderland, England. This was an amateur club that had grown out of the folk blues revival in the 1970s and met once a week every Wednesday evening in the upstairs bar of the Royalty pub on Chester Road in Sunderland, England. I suppose I could see pop musicians doing a lot in terms of the charity work Bob Geldorf initiated and I wanted to see if I could write a song that would speak to some of the issues, that I could sing at the Glebe club which was where I played every Wednesday.

I turned my attention to what I often did for food when I got home from work. And what I often did became translated very easily into the lyric of the song, as you can see from the first section:

Six thirty in the evening, home from work
Take off my coat, relax and have a pee
I washed and shaved, then changed my dirty shirt
Looked in the fridge to find some food for tea

I rummaged in the freezer, couldn't see
A thing to satisfy my appetite
Yes, everything I found appeared to be
Inadequate for such a winter's night

I closed the fridge, turned off the kitchen light
I'd go to town to buy something to eat
I left the house and walked into the night
Perhaps I'd get some fish, maybe some meat

It's all so easy, if you've got the cash
No need to look for, scraps amongst the trash.

The song started, therefore, with thoughts about a destitute figure rummaging for food in waste bins on a cold, dark night. Then in the next section of the song, I go on to make the comparison between driving to the take-out for some fast food or a chinese meal and walking vast distances in a country struck with famine to find a distribution point for grain. The third section draws the stark moral lesson in terms of the politics of food, before resolving the song in the final chorus and bringing the listener's attention back to the question of poverty in England. To this day, I'm not sure whether making the parallel between starvation in Africa and hunger on the relatively affluent streets of England works in the song but, for better or for worse, I chose to craft it that way.

I think it is incredibly difficult to write songs of this nature without falling into the trap of being patronising, sentimental or mawkish. I've also spoken to people at gigs where I've performed the song who really dislike explicit morals being drawn within the lyric of a song. I don't have such a problem with that, having grown up in the era when protest songs were fashionable. However, I can see that that sort of heavy-handed approach could annoy some people a lot. At the time I composed the song, I felt I wanted to take the risk and write at least something - and this was the song that came out.

Finally, just to get a bit pretentiously technical on the song-writing front, the song is constructed from three Spensarian sonnets, each of which contains three quatrains (abab, bcbc, cdcd) and a couplet (ee). The first sonnet section is played in C major and I use quite a few major 7th chords to give it a slightly jazzy feel; this distances it somewhat from the contemporary folk idiom. As the song moves into the second sonnet section, it modulates to E major, only to return again to the home key of C major in the third and final sonnet.

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