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about

Written by Tom Robinson
publihed by BMG Music

lyrics

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

Killing Fields, in the Killing Fields
Sitting here drinking in the killing fields
Killing Fields, in the Killing Fields
Kissing and drinking in the killing fields

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.

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

Sitting and drinking....in the Killing Fields
Smoking and joking....in the Killing Fields
Living & loving....in the Killing Fields

credits

from Faith, Folk & Anarchy (Reissue), released June 16, 2017

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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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