about
Performed at The Stables, Wavendon, Milton Keynes, 28 February 2002
by Tom Robinson (guitar) Steve Knightley (cello mandolin) Martyn Joseph (guitar). Originally on the album Faith Folk & Anarchy Live (2002)
lyrics
The Killing Fields
I fell in love with the bleak fields and sombre streets of Ieper
A place of rain and wide horizons
Its renaissance greatness resurrected
In the winter mists of fen and flatland.
The shadow of tragedy heavy on the landscape...
Mass graves, grassy craters - drizzle, silence and bad drains
Beer, chocolate and death.
I fell in love with impossibly foxy men and women;
Boys and girls called Bart and Ilse,
Wim, Luc, Annalies, Ariane & Lieve...
Faces straight out of Van Eyck paintings
Arguing and laughing over beers in bars.
Not the bland blonds of Holland & the North
But tempered by latin blood, gallic madness
And cursed with a fatal romantic yearning
My heart longed to know them all by name
Smoking and joking in the killing fields
Killing fields, in the killing fields
Sitting here drinking in the killing fields
Killing fields, in the killing fields
Living and loving in the killing fields
Joking and smoking
I fell in love with a maddening language
Ancient, subtle and gutteral:
Mouthfuls of vowels, impossible consonants
Dialects different in every village;
Underpinned by an invisible linguistic rift
And the strife of life on an ethnic faultline
A land jackboot-trampled twice in a century;
The appalling scrawl of spraycan racists
Forgetting the terrible lesson of history
And eager only to repeat it.
Killing fields, in the killing fields
Sitting here drinking in the killing fields
Killing fields, in the killing fields
Living and loving in the killing fields
Joking and smoking in the killing firelds
Laughing and dancing in the killing fields
Living and loving in the killing fields
Sitting here drinking in the killing fields
I fell in love with a capital city north of Napoleon's Waterloo
Multilingual, rich with immigrants
With a passion for fashion, food and politics & music
African jazz, Parisian hip-hop,
Homegrown house and a riotous nightlife,
Grand cafés in filthy buildings
playing Toots Thielamans & Django Reinhardt
Boulevards jammed with trams and taxis
The sad, magnificent, sprawling, seedy metropolis
At the very heart of Old Europe
Killing fields, in the killing fields
Sitting here drinking in the killing fields
Killing fields, in the killing fields
Living and loving in the killing fields
Killing fields, in the killing fields
credits
from
Up Close & Personal,
released January 29, 2024
Composed by Tom Robinson. Recorded by Andrew Griffiths, mixed by Martyn Joseph.
license
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