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Up Close & Personal

by Tom Robinson

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Spain 04:50
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Yuppy Scum 03:21
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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
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War Baby 05:28
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about

This album is a collection of acoustic demos and rarities, as performed by on my solo Up Close & Personal shows. One or two of these tracks are previously unreleased, but most have appeared on other releases such as Castaway Club CDs or Faith, Folk & Anarchy recordings - see indivudual track notes for details.

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released January 29, 2024

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Tom Robinson London, UK

Tom Robinson (b.1950) is a UK songwriter & broadcaster first known in the 70s as an anti-racist and LGBT campaigner. He released 19 albums between 1975-2001 with various bands and has co-written songs with Elton John, Peter Gabriel, Dan Hartman and Manu Katché. He's an award-winning presenter at BBC Radio 6 Music, and released Only The Now (his first album in 19 years) in October 2015. ... more

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