Camber Sands

from Bitter Lemon by The Chickpea Darlings

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about

Jo Darling bought a late 19th century harmonium about three or four years ago... and this started life as my first attempt to write a tune on it. It's tuned about half a semitone lower than 'pitch', however, so I couldn't add anything like a synth line (at least, not without some fairly intensive farting around), so the song only features instruments I could de-tune to fit in... an experience which clearly led me down a fairly apocalyptic rabbit hole, lyric-wise.

lyrics

Words:

If the eyes are telling lies
What’s this haircut say to you?
If these scars don’t tell their story
Please refer to my tattoos
You don’t need to know my blood group
There’s no blood left anyway
Hit the kill switch…

Twenty-nine years after Dresden
Thirty-one before Shanghai
In that accidental moment
There lived you and I
In that accidental moment
We knew we’d probably fry
Hit the kill switch…

When they leaked the master plan
We swapped our home for krugerrands
And buried them in Camber Sands
And hit the kill switch
But we’ve still got our memories
Of pangolins and honey bees
And their unforgiving, evil queen
Who hit the kill switch

They’ll choose some Scottish island
Erase it from the maps
Stockpile insulin and cheap baked beans
And cigarettes and tractor parts
And we’ll murder our own parents
To get our names put in the hat
And then we’ll all be immigrants
Well, who’d have thought of that?
And we’ll horde that sweetest luxury
Old-fashioned pornography
Images of days gone by
Images of you and me
And we’ll shiver on the clifftops
With the sunset and the memories
And the kill switch

Raised on starvation rations
A new species will emerge
Part-human, part-locust
Destined to scour the earth
But on pound shop batteries
Nothing runs for very long
Hit the kill switch…

Buried miles inside the ground
The ancient servers make no sound
Not since the Nikkei ran aground
And they hit the kill switch
In caverns deep, devoid of light
We’re all scratched out in terabytes
That no device can read or write
And we hit the kill switch…

And that biometric lottery
That we all thought we’d won
‘Cos we were blonde and beautiful
The idle rich of Albion
Will spawn a new Olympus
And a pantheon of fools
Who tremble at the rain and snow
And marvel at the moon
And a generation down the line
They won’t need words no more
They’ll scavenge plastic bottles from
The place we called the seashore
The place we called the seashore
The place we called the seashore
The terrifying seashore
The place we called the seashore
Down at Camber Sands
Down at Camber Sands
The place we called
The seashore

credits

from Bitter Lemon, released October 2, 2020
Written by Huw Darling.

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The Chickpea Darlings Letchworth Garden City, UK

'Riot' has OFFICIALLY left the building. Thanks, Darrin.

The Darlings: Middle-aged bedroom miserablists with C86-ish tendencies, The Chickpea Darlings have seen the future and don't care for the cut of its jib. Their dry-as-a-biscuit pop vignettes provide the perfect soundtrack for speculating on the madness to come. Viva Donald Trump, global warming & the death of democracy. Viva the Darlings. ... more

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