Recorded at Ideal Sound Recorders, London 1989
Engineered by David Kenny and John Acock
Cover photos by Jonathan Swain
Design by Tony Engle

Sleeve Notes

Geoff Collings is my version of the ancient ballad Child Colvin - variously collected in this century as Giles Collins and George Collins. The chief protagonist now rides out on the tube train and his lady-love watches the television but, as in Wim Wender's film Wings of Desire, the mythic and fantastic can exist in the modern world just as in the past.

Throw Out the Lifeline is a temperance song written by the Reverend E.S. Ufford. In mid-Victorian England the Temperance Lifeboat Crews carried the metaphor of a sailor drowning in a sea of liquor to extremes, dressing up as lifeboat men and marching with model boats to protest outside taverns. Legend has it that the officer in charge of a half-full lifeboat exhorted his fellow survivors to sing this song lustily in order to obliterate the cries of the drowning multitudes after the sinking of the Titanic.

That great anti-hero Jimmy Porter is alive and drawing his pension in Ash On an Old Man's Sleeve. Acknowledgements are due to a representative of the old guard (theatrically speaking) in the shape of T.S. Elliot, who gives us the song's title, and to the erstwhile new wave's John Osborne who, of course, wrote Look Back in Anger, which propelled Jimmy into legend.

Francois Villon was the greatest poet of medieval France. He was also a thief, brawler, libertine and vagabond. Set Their Mouths to Twisting is one of his “poems in slang” (free-verse translations by Anthony Bonner) which more calls to mind the black-and-white French movie heavy Jean Gabin than Geoffrey Chaucer.

[Ashley Hutchings]