[Track Info] [The Lyrics] [Explanation]
Track 6 from the album "Seasons End" - Album Version: 7:43
Lyrics by Steve Hogarth and John Helmer
Published by Charisma Music Pub. Co. Ltd./ Rondor Music (Ldn) Ltd.
The mascara'd blonde from the Berliner bar
Rises at twilight, gets dressed in a daze
Black leather crackles and cold water runs
As she touches the walls of memory maze
And the shadows of men she has known fill her day
She's held half the world in her arms so they say
But she wakes up without them with a hole in her heart
And she puts on her clothes lives her live behind bars
The mascara'd blonde from the Berliner bar
Sighs at the skylight gets lost in the haze
Black leader crackles and cold water runs
As she touches the walls of her memory maze
Some one got stranded in no man's land
Dancing in the spotlight to the sound of clapping hands
Nobody knows who's side he was on
It's a risk that you take in no man's land
Nobody knows what made him decide
To run for freedom and to certain suicide
When they turn off the guns and his fingers uncurl
He's clutching a photograph of a Berlin party girl
Come in from your checkpoints on your lonely roads
Come in from your ditches in your silent fields
Where intensified light from a rifle sight
Makes the darkness day
And the day too bright, too bright
And we wake up without you
We wake up without you
We wake up without you
We wake up without you
With a hole in our hearts (2x)
You mad dog shaven head bottle boy freaks
In Martens & khaki drunk on sake
You stare at yourself in the cruel flush of dawn
Terrified, sunken eyed, withered and drawn
The butcher, The baker, The munitions maker
The over achiever, the Armistice breaker
The freebase instructor, the lightning conductor
The psycho, The sailor, The tanker, the tailor
The black market mailer
The quick an the dead
The spotlight dancer
The quick and the dead
The quick and the dead
The quick and the dead, hey
We wake up without you
We wake up without you
With a hole in our hearts
The mascara'd blonde from the Berliner bar
Rises at twilight, gets dressed in a daze
Copyright © 1997 Fraser Marshall, Matthew Anderson & Bert ter
Steege.
From a Kerrang article, edition 257 Sept 23 1989: Pre-Season Friendlies by Mick Wall: "I didn't tell him anything about recording 'Misplaced...', or anything that happened to us in Berlin," says Rothery, anticipating the next question. "I just said there was a piece of music we'd written that, from my point of view, had been inspired by Berlin. The place has such a strong atmosphere, and I thought it might be nice to do something structured around that. "John seemed quite intrigued by that and he went away and wrote the initial draft of the Berlin lyric."
‘No-Man's land’
Brewer’s: The name given to the area between hostile
lines of entrenchments or to any space contested by both sides and belonging to neither.
Between checkpoints, there is usually a patch of ground over which both sides do not formally exercise their laws. This is to provide some definite delineation of borders.
‘intensified light from a rifle. . . And
the day too bright’
Light intensifiers digitally increase the amount of light available to the eyes.
The are substantially different from infra-red devices, which rely on the (normally
invisible) red part of the spectrum to function. Light intensifiers are considered to be
as much of a hindrance as a help in a combat situation. The reason is that any light is
intensified, such that explosions can often leave the user disorientated and half blind.
‘bottle boy’
A bottle boy means two things. The first is that the skinhead has dyed his hair
with peroxide; It is sometimes said about dyed-blondes that they got it from a bottle. The
second is a term analogous to the British term ‘Trev’, ‘lager lout’ or
‘beer boy’; A lout who drinks and then tries to have a fight and/or a cheap shag
as their idea of a well rounded Friday night down at the pub.
‘Martens’
A reference to Doctor Marten’s boots, generally considered to be a
combat-style boot.
‘sake’
A Japanese rice-based wine. Do not drink this stuff unless you like vomiting. Very
strong, very lethal.
‘The Butcher, the Baker. . . Tanker,
the Tailor’
This parodies an old nursery rhyme which starts ‘The butcher, the baker, the
candlestick maker, ’ and an old rhyme about “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor,
Rich man, Poor man, Beggar man, Thief” which was a sort of childish divination rhyme
which had some method pointing out which profession a person would supposedly take up upon
adulthood.
‘The Quick and the Dead’
Literally, the alive and the dead. The phrase is used in the Mass.
Sources
Last Modified: 27 Jul 2000