Thursday, 2 February 2012

New Site
















Hey all. I've been a bit dormant on the blog front for a while. A lot of editing of new work that will hopefully appear someplace glossy soon. Spindle magazine have just finished an article on me that (although I have not seen it) should be in the shops. I've also just redone a tumblr site I have that was sitting about unused for the past year. It's full of pictures from the last trip. If you fancy a lookse, hit the link HERE

Friday, 30 December 2011

I'm Back!!!

Back from floods, from fevers, from national disasters, from 700 bitter miles of churned-up Asian roads by bicycle. Back from beaches and jungles and guns and borders and bribed policemen and elephants and landmines and monks and mountains. We made it through in one piece. All of us. The kids are alright.

Wednesday, 10 August 2011

My New Book






















This was ready to go to my new publishers yesterday, but in light of the recent riots, I though it needed a rapid expansion. I've been going non-stop since 11pm last night and now it's finished. What started as a re-write of T.S Eliot's The Wasteland, somehow grew a body and mutated into a kind of Wasteland-X. Mostly written in cafes and sqaures and on benches during giant walks around London.

I'd been living in Central London and was really struck by the grim similarities between Eliot's London and present day. Same ends, totally different means. Where there was mythology, there is advertising, where there was the crawl of the inter-war years, there is mass cuts, mass debts and mass unemployment. I've been following the political scene quite a lot in the last 8 months and this book was written pre-empting a massive combustion of everything.
This combustion happened last night. So, I thought it was only right to pull the book back in and tell it like it is. I don't know if anyone actually reads this thing, but it's out sometime this month - more details to follow.

Saturday, 6 August 2011

Other Places Other News

I've just come back from a month-long travel writing assignment in Spain. A special time and a special place. Hiking volcanoes, jumping off harbour bridges at midnight, watching townspeople flood rose petals over religious processions from their balconies. My Spanish is slowly getting better, my salsa, not so. But there's really far too much to write about in one sitting so I'm just gonna give you some pictures. A few new poems for the ever-expanding Monte Carlo Blonde on the way too. Also some interest in my Zone/1 collection that I finished a few months back. But next month I'm leaving England again, this time to do a thousand-mile bike ride across Asia with my good friend Mr Hawkeye Pierce. Without a doubt the worst idea ever conceived.



















Friday, 6 May 2011

Sunday Walks: Evensong
















Bank, Threadneedle Street, Cheapside, Paternoster Square

Solemn moment in October dusk-light. A clump of tourists gathers round the remembrance wreath. Factory pressed poppies. A young child plays at being general by the side of the Wellington statue, scrawling his name in crayon against the marble. But can we give moment to history’s dead - whose eye we never met, hand we never held? Can we offer anything more than our silence?
Sunday’s tourists taking photos. The Royal Exchange. Money’s muted hub of being. Yes, architecture, yes, gothic sandstone, yes, hold of past over present over future. Strange waymark on the visitor’s map. No one talks. A young couple photograph a tiny gold Pegasus statue spiking out over a streetlamp, as the buildings around them squeeze the last of the sun up through Threadneedle Street, framing the dissolve of a cinematic symbol shot. They’re living inside the camera. We all are – condensing time, depth, and half-remembered moments into single city sentiments. Single metaphors. Single camera-click poetics. Keep them safe, bury them deep in glass and gold – like the man behind me photographing a time-greened Apollo statue against the clean backdrop of sky – for him, for her, for Europe’s London hidden away in some oyster shell we’ll never find.
Now, an Eastern European tramp is jangling cans of lager and singing an incomprehensible song. Now he mounts the wall and begins to gesture wildly. Uncertainty. Discreet aversion. Mapwatching. Something comic in the delivery. Something like Bulgakov. An Uzbek shaman. As if that froth-mouthed Wotan-madness of invisibility and wandering had pulled away the smokescreen and opened the flower’s pure bloom for him alone. He’s trying to help them. Sympathetic magic. He’s saying, right here, right here. It’s all you really need.
Poultry Street. Thomas Hood’s old house five doors down from a Tesco supermarket. No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees. No fruits, no flowers, no leaves. Can we escape history? Can we get free and drift unguided? Can the past give out anything but the dull pinch of nostalgia? The stone cherubs on the Bow Lane church are bored to death, the George Cross flag wilted like week-old spinach. Cheapside is changing. That’s what the sign says. And the scaffolding takes you this way. Comme ca. Empty streets cut up by railings and vacant diggers in the road.
Into Paternoster Square. Into that thing we call soullessness - free of animism’s ley lines. But is it? Is it soulless? What if it survives the jackhammer and a century’s flow of footsteps long enough to gather dust and memory? What then?
I’m just like anyone else. Scared to look back past history’s pop veneer. Scared to be outlived by the commonplace. Scared to be whispered at by the plainness of my own mortality. Yesterday we joked about the statues on the side of St Paul’s wanting to jump since the day it was built. Stuck there. Stuck there watching the same mistakes, the same ugliness, the same unshareable beauty over and over. Yes, everything has its price. And the first hint of a sundowner is shadowing the cathedral. The light on the dome faded to the colour of roseblood; indifferent, unremembering. How do you think it survived The Blitz? A man photographs himself into the scene but gets the angle wrong – gets nothing but a blurred slab of face, a three-day beard and a wall. The near distant rumble of a plane overhead. Feather-whiteness of a vapour trail. Late tourists citying across the square to their next pinpoint. And somehow, a little piece of Sunday’s constitution survives all of this – survives the bookshops and the cafes and the supermarkets. Somehow it empties the streets, respects the evensong of crosses and altars that came before all this - before the hurricane forehead of commerce, before the camera, before the ghost became machine.

The Royal Wedding

So the Royal Wedding is upon us. I abandoned by studies for the day and decided to document that curious species and global phenomenon otherwise known as The Great British Public. Despite the overriding political and economic cynicism of late, it was a really beautiful day; a kind of collective nostaglic insanity swept up all of London and it was lovely to disregard current affairs and celebrate a couple of royal rich kids getting married. Unfortunately I just shelled out loads of money on a new lens but this site doesn't seen to upload photos particularly well!











For Samara
















Pretty sat there with you between the parasols
Where the pale doves flickered and darted
And all the fashionistas ignored their phones
Lulling their heads in cool mantra to the sea

You with your sun-trapped tumble of hair
That stilled the light and glowed an ember red
As you smoked in your wraparound shades
And the sea-breeze surrendered its chin to the sand

Happy faking rich and looking empty
Leafing through menus we couldn’t afford
Letting the clown-rags of our lives back home
Curl and fall like winter’s dead peonies

I played the thinker and you played the star
And we pretended that everyone knew it
Pretended they’d built us in pillow-scent and gold
Still young and unmarked by all of life’s sinews

Not hunted by the clichés of rent and rain
Sealing ourselves into the lavender of money
As it cat-sloped down the jetties from private yachts
All fastened like tiny white pins out in the blue

Pretty that short little hour in that town with you
A tiny seed of memory to drop across the wind
To feed and branch when our drinks ran dry
And we were just two people again

Skin
















I:

It begins here: a darkened room strewn with rags, ropes
And ashtrays. A nightmare-pit called up out of collective memory,
Ten men working under strained bulb-light. Shirtless, silent, focused.

It starts with the smell of diesel fuel, with the humming
Of a near-dead generator, and the tin fizz of a cheap radio
That plays a Malaysian pop song about a boy and a high-school crush.

The viewer recoils as the camera pans and tracks upwards,
Retracts and settles on the line of dead pythons, all strung-up
Eyes milked-over, mouths fallen open at impossible angles.

But why should this seem evil? Think it through. It’s just the entry wound.
The idle club, flaked with scales, the writhing sack in a blurred backshot.
This is the rice-wage, the two dollars these men will make by dusk.

II:

The lens is smothered by a hand. It falls away and crunches into dark.
It cannot penetrate the floodlit sprawl of the Saigon factory floor,
Cannot re-affirm the mile-long rattle and punch of machinery.

It cannot frame the conveyer-children, palming their spreads of
Snakeskin like Rubik’s cube savants: One. Done. Two. Three. Blink.
It can only flash-up stock images of fresh-glued stilettos and handbags.

And this causes a numbness, a disengagement, a resignation of the self.
It is not a wanted thing to push further, to hear the factory child speak,
To name the things she loves: the first bite of an apple, grass, sequins

Or how the sound of plastic wrapping brings her back to the beach
And a feeling she cannot name: low-tide and the sun’s refraction,
How everything she touched was bright, alive and scuttled away.

III:

The camera re-centres on the body of a woman: sweeping the ache of space Between her thighs where a palm might rest against the razor-clam hem
Of her python dress, stilled now, under the strobing pink-blue of a catwalk,

Where her contours uncoil to music, and her ghosted slink sharpens
Into switchblades of coition, that could ragdoll men against ceilings
And walls, and constrict them into the warm rib-crush of rapture.

And the story that came before will shed its weight; become a dim-flickering Algebra, a peripheral scatter of facts, blunted against the final frame:
The soft dissolve of a dawn-coloured eye, in which a snake is sleeping.

Inside The Bunker

It's been a two month house-arrest for all of us round here. Mara's been storyboarding for the BBC, Charlotte's been relentlessly editing fashion shoots and I've been writing my novel. Consequently, Neither me or my camera have seen much daylight, so here's some pictures from deep inside flat 40








Glitter
















Where do you go when the sun dies down?
In the cool slash of blue after the sunstroke
Where girls in gold drink champagne
And palms outstretch their silhouettes
Across the Croisette fizzing with night

Where do you go after the fast cars
Exhale their glitter over beachfront roads?
Sat there tired-smiling with your counterfeit stock
Pitted African skin unnoticed as a gum-stain
As the day’s kissing crowds pass you by

This is not the story that you came to find
Yet it gags you with its polar-cold simplicity
Hangs you with parasols and panamas
Tears out your native tongue with seashells
And other forgettables from the factory-press

Maybe when sleep pulls you under you see
Your children playing effervescent with the insects
Or a woman that held you hip-deep in elephant grass
And whispered in a language that has no use here
Like your birthday or age or favourite shoes

That deep unwashable sadness coiled into your blood
Does it come from a thing that you left or you found?
Something torched in a village or cleaned by the birds
Before they folded you down into a container ship
And kicked you to the beach like an empty can

Will you see out the summer as it lengthens?
Sell enough beads or bracelets to retain your shadow
To locket your thoughts of wife and child and river
Or just evaporate as print-less as you entered
And be a different face tomorrow?

Sacred Heart

















She could not strike the match. Could not force that
Prometheus brush-light into the frozen moment.

She could not paint: nothing but dandelions and the weeds
Of idiot-love. She could not build Gods. She smashed the hives

But found no honey there, dragged her empty nets back up from
The floodwater, and caught nothing but the vacuum. Nothing but

The late wind through the hinges. Soon they found her. Sniffed her
Out in the amber wolf-light of her studio. The sympathetic butchers:

The kings of carrion with their brushes. Day after day they painted her.
She sat mute, unremembering, sun-white and tired as milk. Watching

As they channelled her fissures into breaking thunderheads of form:
The tragic’s body-mask of pigskin. They painted her in Juan Les Pins,

In Antibes, in the corners of Sainte Maxime under sagging mist. In a
Carbon-crush of charcoal or oils, between the palm-lined awnings of

The Eden Roc Hotel. On private beaches, breaking the surface of the blue Morning’s glass. Each seeing something else: some other awful miracle

Of the skin, a new note in her wasteland sphere-song humming itself
Up out of the dark. And she became her nothings; became the story,

Became the easy myth of the woman too beautiful, which would fan itself out
One night, with the pistol she kept in her bedside cabinet, for the nights she

Dreamed of sleeping. And the eulogy would sprawl, flowers haemorrhage
Their petals across the coffin. And she would be remembered;

Childlike, cello-shaped, deep among the sunflowers in her flannel
Chemise, never knowing it was her, who was to be the masterpiece.

F.Scott















It happened at the season’s turn
When the sun feathered south with the starlings
And autumn’s iodine fumed the trees.
That day his creations came for him;
Pinned out his murder in a bare-roomed
Cuneiform of pain; poured themselves back into
The bottle, so he would die alone, drink in hand;
Nuzzled into that motherless cub-language
With which he carefully printed them.

No more Gatsbys, no more Carraways,
No glasses raised against the pale morning’s tide.
No heroes left to snatch down stars for love.
The last guests scuttling westward,
Unclaimed jackets still stacked in the hall.
Everything blotted into the silence of an inkspill
That ate the page and called no mourners to the casket.
A snow of oak leaves gathered in the empty pool.
The old house hung in the after-smoke of a fable fiction
Where maze and maker and minotaur became one,
And night’s curtain knew no tenderness.

And even the cemetery refused the body.
Parish priests read the books and shook their heads.
As if the injurous vision of his pages could immolate,
Sparking the republic’s dark fields into a junkyard of flame;
Burning out the jet-set coastal cities into stillness;
Pulling the pin on the stock market’s salt-rim paradise;
Sealing that bright green iris of light
That held itself like a bullet hole in the sky
Into empty-throated dusk.

Sunday Walks: Vanishing Point

















Tottenham Court Rd, Denmark St, Charing Cross Rd, New Oxford St

And the city just moves that way – synaptual, firing off at random as Centre Point hangs in winter’s streaked grey wash. Somehow the scene looks like it’s been dragged up from the ‘80s – grainy light, colour-bleached concrete and exhaust fumes - backlit anti-nostalgia of the Poll Tax and the Falklands.
On the corner of Earnshaw Street an old African woman is repeating come back, come back to Jesus over and over, her voice drowned out by the flat thundering of the JCB digger. She tries to palm a leaflet to the girl in her Friday night heels, who’s flipping her hair and playing with a touchscreen phone. And I see that whole nihilist cliff-face that Heidegger talked about, zipping its way in and out of all the bright technology in her hand and I think to myself that a war’s coming somehow. And the man next to me shouts grande skinny latte to go and post-structure re-affirms its beliefs in imbroglio and I look at the coffee beans humming in their vat over the counter of a Starbucks and think about the manacled child, chained and bullwhipped into marketing strategies and it reminds me somehow of Donne’s flea, and how our two bloods mingled be.
And outside the weather’s already cut in – windless slate-cold afternoon, where everyone inches past with their white headphones like external organs or drip-feeds for the escape pulled down into themselves. Because this is pass-through territory – getgo, all points flowing outward: bollards, half-build, debris, excavation roadworks taped together by polythene where all the signs point down into one big, claw-grasping lock of aphasia: Zone Ends, No Direction, Busses Only, Bar 100, Harmony Sex Shop, Won’t Be Beat On Price, Three Days Left.

And the landscape’s defined by cranes, justified by cranes, made redundant by cranes, made transitory yet frozen by cranes; all hanging idle as their intercoms, behind paint-peeled shopfronts and cement silos. And somehow you know it’s always been like this – like a prospect town with no gold in its head, knocked up and nailed together for providence, just another fiction like all those imported Parisian silks that filled the shopfronts and the mudbanks of the Yukon.
A mess of scaffold holds the corner of Charing Cross Road together. The sign says we’re building. Underneath, a homeless man with one leg shivers under the awning of the buildingworks and pulls his fists in tight under his armpits. I buy him a cup of tea from Costa. He nods his heads and smiles. His face reminds me of a picture of Yuri Gagarin I saw when I was a kid – a fearface, soul-stripped, blank – the face of the man who went there first and looked out and found that place where stars are screamed into being and saw nothing but the dark matter. Two doors down there’s a window full cocktail dresses hanging weightless over powdered snow, and suddenly you realise how modern aspiration’s a rip-off, how it’s hidden back in third-world generators; cotton fields for cotton shirts and cotton dresses and denim and coffee beans for endless coffee bars and that’s what the city runs on: battery farms and juntas and rendition and bloodtrails.

And you turn down into Denmark Street to see the boys all dressed in Topshop PLO yashmaghs, wishing over all the guitars piled softly into the windows. They’re willing themselves into the other daydream – the perpetual childhood of musicians, the loss of the real, the blondes and their Virgin Mary tattoos, the cognitive angles of angst and youth-flash.
Now, three doors down and out into the mainstreet, an ambulance is thrashing its sirens, held at the traffic lights on New Oxford Street. the girls at the traffic lights are talking about a boy that never called – so he’s just, like, ignoring you? And the sign on the side of the 242 bus to Homerton hospital reads we are London. Are you?

Sunday, 13 February 2011

It's nice when a film kicks about inside your camera and you forget about the pictures you took. Here's a few I found, shot on my Smena 8m with some Kodak Ektachrome about 3 years out of date.



Saturday, 8 January 2011

An old and well loved poem






















SLOWLY I MARRIED HER
By Leonard Cohen

Slowly I married her
Slowly and bitterly married her love
Married her body
….in boredom and joy
Slowly I came to her
Slow and restfully came to her bed
Came to her table
in hunger and habit
….came to be fed
Slowly I married her
sanctioned by none
with nobody’s name
….amid general warnings
….amid general scorn
Came to her fragrance
….my nostrils wide
Came to her greed
….with seed for a child
Years in the coming
and years in retreat
….Slowly I married her
Slowly I kneeled
And now we are wounded
….so deep and so well
that no one can hurt us
except Death itself
….And all through Death’s dream
I move with her lips
The dream is a night
….but eternal the kiss
And slowly I come to her
…slowly we shed
the clothes of our doubting
….and slowly we wed

Wednesday, 22 December 2010

"Last Letter" - Ted Hughes

A new, unpublished poem of his that has just been found. Ted Hughes. My hero.






















Last Letter

What happened that night? Your final night.
Double, treble exposure
Over everything. Late afternoon, Friday,
My last sight of you alive.
Burning your letter to me, in the ashtray,
With that strange smile. Had I bungled your plan?
Had it surprised me sooner than you purposed?
Had I rushed it back to you too promptly?
One hour later—-you would have been gone
Where I could not have traced you.
I would have turned from your locked red door
That nobody would open
Still holding your letter,
A thunderbolt that could not earth itself.
That would have been electric shock treatment
For me.
Repeated over and over, all weekend,
As often as I read it, or thought of it.
That would have remade my brains, and my life.
The treatment that you planned needed some time.
I cannot imagine
How I would have got through that weekend.
I cannot imagine. Had you plotted it all?

Your note reached me too soon—-that same day,
Friday afternoon, posted in the morning.
The prevalent devils expedited it.
That was one more straw of ill-luck
Drawn against you by the Post-Office
And added to your load. I moved fast,
Through the snow-blue, February, London twilight.
Wept with relief when you opened the door.
A huddle of riddles in solution. Precocious tears
That failed to interpret to me, failed to divulge
Their real import. But what did you say
Over the smoking shards of that letter
So carefully annihilated, so calmly,
That let me release you, and leave you
To blow its ashes off your plan—-off the ashtray
Against which you would lean for me to read
The Doctor’s phone-number.
My escape
Had become such a hunted thing
Sleepless, hopeless, all its dreams exhausted,
Only wanting to be recaptured, only
Wanting to drop, out of its vacuum.
Two days of dangling nothing. Two days gratis.
Two days in no calendar, but stolen
From no world,
Beyond actuality, feeling, or name.

My love-life grabbed it. My numbed love-life
With its two mad needles,
Embroidering their rose, piercing and tugging
At their tapestry, their bloody tattoo
Somewhere behind my navel,
Treading that morass of emblazon,
Two mad needles, criss-crossing their stitches,
Selecting among my nerves
For their colours, refashioning me
Inside my own skin, each refashioning the other
With their self-caricatures,

Their obsessed in and out. Two women
Each with her needle.

That night
My dellarobbia Susan. I moved
With the circumspection
Of a flame in a fuse. My whole fury
Was an abandoned effort to blow up
The old globe where shadows bent over
My telltale track of ashes. I raced
From and from, face backwards, a film reversed,
Towards what? We went to Rugby St
Where you and I began.
Why did we go there? Of all places
Why did we go there? Perversity
In the artistry of our fate
Adjusted its refinements for you, for me
And for Susan. Solitaire
Played by the Minotaur of that maze
Even included Helen, in the ground-floor flat.
You had noted her—-a girl for a story.
You never met her. Few ever met her,
Except across the ears and raving mask
Of her Alsatian. You had not even glimpsed her.
You had only recoiled
When her demented animal crashed its weight
Against her door, as we slipped through the hallway;
And heard it choking on infinite German hatred.

That Sunday night she eased her door open
Its few permitted inches.
Susan greeted the black eyes, the unhappy
Overweight, lovely face, that peeped out
Across the little chain. The door closed.
We heard her consoling her jailor
Inside her cell, its kennel, where, days later,
She gassed her ferocious kupo, and herself.

Susan and I spent that night
In our wedding bed. I had not seen it
Since we lay there on our wedding day.
I did not take her back to my own bed.
It had occurred to me, your weekend over,
You might appear—-a surprise visitation.
Did you appear, to tap at my dark window?
So I stayed with Susan, hiding from you,
In our own wedding bed—-the same from which
Within three years she would be taken to die
In that same hospital where, within twelve hours,
I would find you dead.
Monday morning
I drove her to work, in the City,
Then parked my van North of Euston Road
And returned to where my telephone waited.

What happened that night, inside your hours,
Is as unknown as if it never happened.
What accumulation of your whole life,
Like effort unconscious, like birth
Pushing through the membrane of each slow second
Into the next, happened
Only as if it could not happen,
As if it was not happening. How often
Did the phone ring there in my empty room,
You hearing the ring in your receiver—-
At both ends the fading memory
Of a telephone ringing, in a brain
As if already dead. I count
How often you walked to the phone-booth
At the bottom of St George’s terrace.
You are there whenever I look, just turning
Out of Fitzroy Road, crossing over
Between the heaped up banks of dirty sugar.
In your long black coat,
With your plait coiled up at the back of your hair
You walk unable to move, or wake, and are
Already nobody walking
Walking by the railings under Primrose Hill
Towards the phone booth that can never be reached.
Before midnight. After midnight. Again.
Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.

At what position of the hands on my watch-face
Did your last attempt,
Already deeply past
My being able to hear it, shake the pillow
Of that empty bed? A last time
Lightly touch at my books, and my papers?
By the time I got there my phone was asleep.
The pillow innocent. My room slept,
Already filled with the snowlit morning light.
I lit my fire. I had got out my papers.
And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’

Friday, 10 December 2010

Riot State















And in the middle of that surge - in the carnage and the flares and the truncheons. Somewhere, in the bottles and the smoke and the eight-horse charge of the riot squad, I felt so beautifully alive...

Friday, 3 December 2010

Winterland




































The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.


Some absolutely beautiful pictures taken by my girlfriend a few weeks ago. Poem by Carl Sandburg

Sunday, 21 November 2010

Saturday Night















It’s late tonight. I can’t sleep and i thought that just for once, I'd write something about myself. I don’t think anybody ever reads this, so it can hardly matter much. Somewhere out there, it's Saturday night; i can hear the near-off whispering of traffic and trains along Bishopsgate, the all-night busses around the city and people coming home to rest. I always think I see more than that, hear more, imagine more, but I won’t drown things in possibility.
Past my window I can see the city all lit up; dim-flickering with the evening’s ebbing current. And what else? I don't really know. I'm living in Central London now. I can walk to St Paul’s in ten minutes, watch the lovers along the Southbank, take photographs of lightscapes of water. I go to the Barbican and drink coffee by the canal. Find silence. I drink coffee these days. I seem to like it. I never used to. I do a lot of walking. I walk for hours around the city. fill little notebooks with scene sketches of how fabrics catch the wind and how people watch themselves in the reflections of department store windows.
I’m 29 now. My book won an award, came out, sold out in eight days, and is approaching a re-print. I’m working on my novel most days. I’m spending a lot of time on the tube, just writing and thinking. My second poetry collection is also nearly finished – maybe January. It’s softer than the first, gentler, a little less switchblade and little more orchid. I’m tired all the time. I’m editing a lot of work for other people. I spent a lot of time in Cannes and Monaco this summer, and in California the year before. I’ve got a beautiful girlfriend who I love very much. We understand each other. She strokes my hair. She keeps me sane. She makes beautiful films. We waited very quietly, for too many years, before we agreed on what had always been.

Tuesday, 12 October 2010

Billionaire

















Thin varnish that peels on sight
Soft money and a cobalt blue sunset
Under the palm trees at dusk

Here too are knife-cratered landscapes
Formed in the geology of hotels and yachts
And the mirrored walkways where we kissed

Here the Russian billionaire sleeps soundly

Here the Saudi sheikh forgets his chaste women

Here the African street seller is dumped at sea

Hard thing to unpick its sun-happy sequins
A fast car and a penthouse suite at the Carlton
And I’d un-see the blood-trails below

I’d trade whole the truth and my junkyard eyes
For a diamond panther from Cartier
And let the killers all run free

With you sat there in your evening dress
And you turn to me and say beautiful Cannes
And I feel sad because I think it too