A different type of song from a similar inspiration this time. I wrote 'Silent Chorus' in 2016 while worrying about the increasingly divisive politics of the West, and perhaps the world in general. Whether it's a function of late-stage capitalism, or an accidental byproduct of social media algorithms wherein negative engagement is often more successful than positive engagement, I was and remain reluctant to be railroaded into any particular group or position: finding common ground seems to me to be one of our principle missions in life. That's not to say that I find it diifficult to condemn fascism and bigotry, for example - I don't - but I prefer to take the writer's approach, which is to say a somewhat solitary one. The scariest thing I've ever witnessed is the liminality of crowds: being the social beasts we are, we find ourselves able to do things with a group's permission that we would never consider doing alone. Those can be great things that bring us on a species, and they can be utterly shameful things, but (and here's the terrifying bit) in the moment of crowd-fuelled execution, they feel equally good. We are ready and willing to be persuaded that we are better, more righteous, more deserving than whichever group we are othering at any given time, so much so that rules which we would furiously enforce upon them do not really apply to us - when WE break the rules, it's for GOOD reasons. When THEY do it it's because they are (insert dehumanising vocabulary here). Any view, uncritically held, can lead us there with the right degree of encouragement from bad-faith actors - often the 'self-made man' mentioned in the song.
The song itself is of a type that uses music chiefly as an unobtrusive frame for the lyrics, which are lengthy and a bit convoluted. That's a consequence of their having more or less poured out in a oner. I only have a handful of songs like this in the catalogue, being somewhat in thrall to the verse/chorus/verse/bridge/chorus formula, but sometimes you want to avoid any 'singalong' element, you just need to get a thing off your chest. My son Fergus, who was 11 at the time, gamely agreed to sing for this recording, a cowardly deflection on my part but a really great performance on his. He understood the point of the song inuitively and, I think, relays it better than I do when I sing it. Rather selfishly he has, in the intervening years, allowed his voice to break, which makes this a poignant listen for his parents as I'm sure you can imagine.
Silent Chorus is on There Will Be A Test At The End, one of several demo albums I've made over the years and which only I and perhaps a dozen other folk have copies of.
Will you be the German who is tutting through the shutters as the trains roll by
Or will you be the Christian busy ticking off the reasons you can shut your eyes?
Screw the Left, screw the Right, this is everybody's fight, and we're battling the evil in our hearts
It's a long road to Hell but we know the journey well, and a hatred of the stranger's where it starts
Will you be enchanted by the pretty little whispers of the self-made man
Strutting on the scaffold of the skeletons he shackled as he made his plans?
Well his dazzling election was a clever misdirection, builds a figurehead to follow or defeat
Still whenever evil comes, braying trumpets, banging drums, it's the likes of you and me that keep the beat
See the little kingdoms slickly built to keep the guilt and sorrow out of range
Mastering the darkness simply saturates the masses with a fear of change
We cajole, we corral, who's against us, who's our pal, who's the sacrifice to calm the raging seas?
Tides will rise, tides will fall, breakers burst against the wall - it's our terror that will bring us to our knees
Each of us is given just one minute, and a million choices every day
Struggle for the love or love the struggle of the jungle hunter gone astray
Comfort loosens our grip, wicked wishes crack the whip, and a black and hungry vulture takes the air
Every road goes up or down, we can climb or we can drown, be the Beast, or be the Angel if we dare.
