(This is the third in a series of
posts about songs from the 1981 to 1985 period about TSOM songs which were
unreleased at the time, following on from posts on Driver and Some Kind of Stranger (Early))
One of the most fascinating curios
from the tape of Portastudio demos which ultimately surfaced on the 1990
bootleg album Hard Reign is usually entitled Burn It Down, a 1982 demo of an idea which would eventually culminate to
the song Burn, effectively the title
track of The Reptile House EP (with its opening line, “Burn me a fire in the
reptile house”).
Musically, the track Burn It Down (kindly uploaded here to YouTube by Ade M) would seem to have little in common with the finished Burn, although the Doktor’s famous
rattled drum machine into the song is identical, an obvious early clue that the
two songs share the same lineage. However, what follows is a song with little
evident relationship to the eventual Burn,
with a primitive production and heavily reverbed vocal over a simple repeated
guitar riff of the same note played over two octaves, much in the style of the
1980 Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark track, Messages. It has been alleged that this track is one of those
which Eldritch worked on independently in the basement of his then abode (7
Village Place in the Burley area of Leeds), and certainly the track has a
similar feel to the early demo version of Anaconda
and that of Driver, as previously
discussed on this blog.
Apart from the drum machine intro,
the other major link between Burn It Down
and Burn is in the lyrics of the
former, which resurfaced in the backwards section of the Reptile House version
of Burn, just before its final
chorus. The backwards section, a sly nod to the satanic messages allegedly
contained in similar records by the likes of Ozzy Ozbourne and The Beatles and much discussed still in the early 1980s, can
be heard clearly on the bootleg single “NRUB” which is simply the track Burn played backwards, enabling us to
hear the relevant section the right way round, with Eldritch singing :
“The Catherine wheel,
the ring of fire,
The wheel goes round
and the flame gets higher
Round the juggling men
and the idiot clown.”
Although the lines are
in a different order, the same lyrics are clearly audible on Burn It Down, and this section has been
widely taken to be a reference to The Gunpowder Plot, a famous event in UK
history where a group of (Roman Catholic) conspirators led by Guy (Guido)
Fawkes attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London in 1605, an
event commemorated by many in the UK to this day on the anniversary of the
foiling of the plot, November 5th. The modern-day celebrations take
the form of a bonfire (with the ceremonial burning of a model “Guy”) and
fireworks, of which the catherine wheel is a popular and colourful variety.
Although the Burn It Down lyric contains no reference
to the "catherine wheel", the idea of burning the “circus” (i.e. Parliament) to
the ground is very much present, and the line “Some day I hope to turn and
stand and watch this city burning down” gives further credence to this lyrical
interpretation, with further allusions to the Dick Whittington story
(contemporaneous to the Gunpowder Plot) to tie the image of the “city” to
London. Capitalising the word “city” in the lyric would of course make this an
anti-capitalist song, with the phrase “The City” being shorthand for the
financial district of the UK capital (which is situated in the original heart
of London known as “The City of London”), broadening the target of Eldritch’s
invective.
Another, more recent
historical event is brought to mind by the opening stanza in Burn It Down which refers to “bullets
blowing holes” and the “orange and white lie in the stones”, possibly
referencing the events which ultimately lead to the independence of the
(Catholic) Republic of Ireland from the UK, with the attack on the Post Office
in Dublin in 1916 which famously left bullet holes in the building’s façade.
Westminster itself was the also the site of Irish Republican terrorism during
“The Troubles” in the 1979 killing of the politician Airey Neave, an event
possibly in Eldritch’s mind when he wrote his lyric in the early 1980’s.
Eldritch himself
admitted that the Reptile House was the band’s most political work in
contemporary interviews, but claimed that the term the “reptile house” had a
much wider significance than Westminster. He told the free francophone Belgian
magazine “Rock this Town” (in 1983, presumably from the time of the Brussels
gig in early August of that year), “The Reptile House is also a reference to
the whole world. It’s a concept EP : the mix is muddy, the melodies are hidden
within a swarming mass of sound, very slow sounds which suddenly hit you like
an arrow. To me, most people are snakes. The Reptile House is a metaphor for
the world which we have to live in and from which there is no escape. There are
no windows in the reptile house, and the record ends with a reprise of the
introduction of the first song. It’s a never-ending circle.” He repeated a
similar idea to the American radio station WNYU in September of that year,
adding “the last track starts like it’s gonna be a sort of pop number and the
voice just slithers back into the mix and the tune distorts itself.”
Hiding the earlier
Reptile House meaning (i.e. Parliament) in the final mix of Burn in a backwards section
may have appealed to Eldritch’s subversive sense of humour, but technically the
idea may have come from the engineer for the session’s at Ken Giles’ KG Studios
in Bridlington, John Spence. Last year he told the TSOM 1980-1985 Facebook fanpage, “The backwards vocal on Burn
may have been my idea. I’d used backwards recording a lot at Fairview Studios
before this record but it wasn’t a technique that Ken Giles ever used I’m
fairly sure, so Andy probably hadn’t come across it before. Not difficult to
do, but you have to be on your toes. It involves turning the tape over so that
it plays in reverse, feeding the lead vocal into a delay effect with lots of
regen and recording the effect onto a clear track. When the tape is played the
right way, the effect comes before the original vocal.”
Not only would Burn
become the key track on what Eldritch referred to in a postcard to John Peel as
“The Commercial Suicide EP”, but it also opened the band’s live shows during
the second half of 1983 and throughout the heavy touring year of 1984. Burn It Down serves as another reminder
of the way in which Eldritch would refine original ideas in crafting a song,
with the finished version often so far removed from the original demo that it
effectively becomes a different song, as with Driver/Heartland. Burn It Down is also significant as the conceptual starting point for The Reptile House
EP, which Eldritch would correctly describe in the American radio interview as “our
finest hour yet”, a claim that many would argue remains true to this day.
My thanks for this post are due to the
ever-wonderful Ultimate Sisters Resource Guide online resource (for the Rock This Town
interview), Phil V, LG and others who share their resources on the fascinating
Facebook group, Ade M for allowing those of us with shallow pockets to access
rare bootleg recordings, Ez Mo for his lyrical analysis on Heartland Forum, and John S for sharing
his recording reminiscences with the FB group.
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