New Model Army Song Archive

Leeds Road 3am

Leeds Road:
A main road in Bradford, beginning east of the city centre and running for 2 miles or 3 kilometres in east northerly direction.

Sixty-five:
65 mph are 105 km/h.

Rushton Street:
In Bradford, there is only a Rushton Road, a small street at the eastern end of Leeds Road.

Mondeo:
The Ford Mondeo is a large family car, built from 1993 up to the present day.

Inner ring:
There are streets forming an inner and an outer ring around the centre of Bradford. The inner ring crosses the western end of Leeds Road.

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Let's Dance

The twist, the stomp, the mashed potato:
All popular dance steps in the early 1960s.

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A Liberal Education

The song:
It's anti-liberal, and very disciplinarian and authoritarian. The song is basically all about growing up. I happen to think that children become strong and adult by fighting against adults and authority. In United States, all adults are terrified of their children, and that song is a reflection of how American adults see their kids. They are terrified of standing up to them. The parents there have abdicated the responsibility of taking on their children and fighting them.
- Source: Justin Sullivan in an interview with the Melody Maker on 28th July 1984 -

Eden:
Paradise in the bible. God creates the first two humans there, Adam and Eve. There are also two (apple) trees in the garden, the fruit of which Adam and Eve are not allowed to eat: the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. (The devil in the disguise of) a snake persuades Eve to eat a fruit from the tree of knowlege, and she in turn persuades Adam, and both become wise and start wearing clothes. So before they can also eat from the tree of life and become immortal, God chases Adam and Eve away from Eden.
- Source: The Bible. Genesis, 2.5-3.24 - Read more: King James Bible -

Walls:
Walls come tumbling down in the bible all the time. However, if this is a biblical reference, the "sacred town" can only be Jerusalem, so this probably refers to the fall of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the capital of the people of Judah and home of the Jewish temple. Around 600 B.C. town and temple were destroyed by the Babylonians and the people of Judah were brought to Babylon. Until today religious Jews believe that the whole of Jerusalem is meant to belong to them so they can finally rebuild their temple. In the bible the destruction of Jerusalem is God's punishment for whatever.
- Source: The Bible. 2 Kings, 25.1-21 - Read more: King James Bible -

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Lights Go Out

US Remix:
This remix was done by Andy Wallace for American clubs and radio . . . everybody loved it, except Amrican clubs and radio.
- Source: B-Sides and Abandoned Tracks booklet -

53 years:
Being born in 1915, Justin Sullivan's father was 71, when the song was released, while he was 53 in 1968, when Justin was 12 years old.

Office:
Welfare office, the checque is social welfare benefit.

Young pretender:
Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), commonly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, was the grandson of the English King James II. Being a Roman Catholic (while after the Reformation in 1535 England was Anglican and the king head of the Anglican Church) James II was desposed in the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and replaced by the Dutch William of Orange. The Jacobite movement tried to restore the Stuart family to the throne, while Charles's opponents called his father "the Old Pretender" and himself "the Young Pretender".
- Read more: Wikipedia -

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Living in the Rose

The song:
Many people in the countries of the Third World don't have any possessions, they only have their bare life. The jungle gives them shelter and the sea gives them food. There are worse things in life than this sort of poverty. We all live by the mercy of the earth, and survive with her. But we've made things complicated with the organization of our civilisation. In the end we will be back in the earth's arms. You can't seperate people from nature or from themselves.
- Source: Justin Sullivan in an interview with German magazine Zillo 10/90; my translation-

Her:
The Earth's. Like Vanity, Whirlwind and perhaps White Coats, this song is apparently influenced by the Gaia hypothesis.

City:
The ancient Greek legend of Atlantis comes to mind. Atlantis was a rich, powerful island in the Atlantic Ocean whose people became wicked and impious and that was swallowed up by the sea as a result of earthquakes. Although Atlantis is probably a mere legend, from the Middle Ages even until today people have tried to identify it with an actual country.
- Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica -

Living in the rose:
English for the French phrase "la vie en rose" which means to be happy, without a care, lead a life as if in paradise.

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Long Goodbye

Bell to toll:
A death bell. I don't know if he actually invented this image, but English 17th century poet John Donne wrote (in his 'Meditation 17' in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions): "Every man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee". Ernest Hemingway used this passage for the title of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War between republicans and Franco's fascist regime.

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LS43

LS43:
This looks like a Leeds postcode; however, the Leeds postcode area only ranges from LS1 to LS29.

Busted out to the halfway house:
To bust out means to escape, to break out of prison; a halfway house can either be a "centre for rehabilitating former prisoners, psychiatric patients, or others unused to non-institutional life", or an "inn midway between two towns". Since in the song they bust out to rather than of halfway house, I tend to prefer the second definition.
- Source: The New Oxford Dictionary of English -

Undercliffe Road:
There is a small road of this name in the far north of Bradford.

Baildon Moor:
A place north of Bradford.

Burning bridges:
Figuratevely, to burn one's bridges means to "do something which makes it impossible to return to an earlier state".
- Source: The New Oxford Dictionary of English -

All the rooms at the Inn are taken:
This reminds me of the birth of Jesus Christ, who, according to the Gospel of Luke, was laid into a manger, because his parents Mary and Joseph, having come to Bethlehem in order to register in a census, had found no place for themselves at the inn.
- Source: The Bible. Luke 2, 7 - Read more: Wikipedia -

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Lurhstaap

The song:
This is a song about the end of the DDR (German Democratic Republic). Here's the story:
After Nazi Germany had lost World War II, the Allied Powers (USA, England, France and Soviet Union) divided Germany into four occupation zones with the former capital Berlin, which was right in the middle of the Soviet part, divided in two. Since the Soviet Union and the three western powers did not get along very well, in 1949 Germany was finally separated into two independent countries, the Federal Republic (BRD) in the west and the DDR in the east. The eastern part of Berlin became the DDR's capital, while the western part remained in western possession. Both halves were separated by the Berlin Wall, which was built by the DDR in 1961 to prevent people from fleeing to West Germany.
While the BRD became a rich, capitalistic, democratic, liberal country where everyone was sooo happy (except maybe the 8% of unemployed people (not counting the millions of women who would have liked to work, but there was no proper child care available)), the DDR became, at least on paper, a socialistic, anti-fascist state. Really this meant that the DDR's government was a one party dictatorship (while in West Germany we kept chancellor Helmut Kohl for 16 years voluntarily!!!!!!!!) where people could not freely express their opinions, support a religion, travel to foreign countries and buy bananas. A powerful instrument of control was the Stasi (Staatssicherheitsdienst, State Security Service), a highly efficient secret service that spied on its own people. The economy did not go well either, so it - for ordinary people - was impossible to get luxury goods in the shops. The high party officials could get anything they wanted. This is why the DDR always looked so grey and sad, because people could not even get the materials necessary to maintain their buildings. On the other hand, the DDR had an unemployment rate of virtually 0%. Basic goods (food, clothing, housing) were extremely inexpensive. And while it was natural for every woman to work and the law was very liberal on abortions, still the birth rate in East Germany was much higher than that in the West, because there were enough day nurseries, kindergardens and all-day schools to look after everyone's children and people did not have to worry about their future.
In the long run people were dissatisfied with the poor economical conditions and the lack of liberty. In the 1980s, when Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev introduced a series of liberalizing reforms in the Eastern bloc states, opposition groups started to grow, their members risking to be imprisoned for stating their opinions. Most of them hoped that the DDR would remain an independent state, only with a really democratic government and a really socialistic economic system. In the summer of 1989 a reformist Hungarian government began to allow East Germans to escape to the West through Hungary's newly opened border with Austria. By the fall, thousands of East Germans had followed this route, while thousands of others sought asylum in the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw, demanding that they'd be allowed to emigrate to the BRD. Mass demonstrations in the streets of Leipzig and other East German cities defied the authorities and demanded reforms. On the evening of 9th November 1989 the communist authorities announced new travel regulations intended to enable those who wished to travel to the West to do so directly from East Germany with official permission. Through the ineptitude of the regime, however, this was widely interpreted as a decision to open the Berlin Wall, so that crowds demanded to pass into West Berlin. Unprepared, the border guards let them go. In a night of revelry tens of thousands of East Germans poured through the crossing points in the wall, celebrated their new freedom with rejoicing West Berliners and literally danced on the wall.
Helmut Kohl ceased the opportunity and West Germany simply swallowed the DDR. Kohl claimed all the glory for the reunification, which eventually took place on 3rd October 1990. This was a hard blow for everybody who had fought for reforms while it was still dangerous, but the majority of East Germans was really happy at first. By now, however, the West Germans are tired of paying higher taxes for the rebuilding of the east, and the East Germans are tired of being unemployed or getting lower wages than the West Germans. All East Germans are stupid, all West Germans know-alls, everybody blames everybody else for the decline of the all-German economy, and we all want the wall back. The ones who most profited from unification once again were the large companies that in a frenzy of privatisation bought the ex-DDR companies practically for free, were flooded with public money and can now keep their immense profits all for themselves.

Another song about the German reunification is Freedom '91 .

Lurhstaap:
Obviously the meaning of the word is a band secret and will remain for ever unknown. Suggestions have included that it is a foreign word, a swear word spelled backwards or an anagramm for something. However, all attempts to decipher the word have lead to nothing, and I believe it actually does not mean anything at all.

One swallow never made a spring:
Also: One swallow does not make a summer: Proverb meaning "a single fortunate event doesn't mean that what follows will also be good". The possible origin is Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC), who writes in his Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1, Chapter 7: "for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy."
- Source: The New Oxford Dictionary of English - Read more: Project Gutenberg -

Let our people go:
Biblical reference. The children of Jewish progenitor Israel live in Egypt, but the new Pharaoh oppresses and enslaves them. So God tells Moses to ask the Pharao to "Let my people go" (Exodus, 5.1; 8.1 and many other places). The Pharaoh refuses, God sends several plagues on Egypt, and finally Moses escapes with the people of Israel and leads them through the desert away from Egypt and to the Promised Land "flowing with milk and honey" (Exodus, 3.8). The place describd in the bible is where the modern state of Israel was founded. Justin's version of what happens in the desert can be found in Ten Commandments.
- Source: The Bible. Exodus, 1.1-15.21 - Read more: King James Bible -

Changing winds:
This is commonly thougth to be a reference to the Scorpions' song "Wind of Change", an uncritical celebration of the political changes in Eastern Europe. However, according to Wikipedia, that song first appeared on the album "Crazy World" on November 6 1990, while New Model Army's album "Impurity", which features "Lurhstaap", came out in September 1990.

Twenty-five miles north:
Unclear reference. If I am correct in assuming that this means 25 miles (i.e. 40 km) north of Berlin, two places come to my mind: Wandlitz, which is rather 13 miles or 20 kms north of Berlin and has no college, but is famous for containing the Waldsiedlung (forest settlement), a secured housing area in which high functionaries of the DDR government lived; and Eberswalde, rather 31 miles or 50 km north of Berlin, surrounded by large forests, site of an abandoned forestry academy.
- Read more: Wikipedia entries on Waldsiedlung and Eberswalde -

Lust for Power

The song:
The song describes the strange moment when you have reached a goal. And what comes next? What do you do when you've become very rich? You can get even richer, but what do you do next?
- Source: Justin Sullivan in an interview with German magazine Zillo 10/90; my translation -

Fatted Calves:
Fatted calf is a metaphor or symbol of festive celebration and rejoicing for someone's long-awaited return. It derives from the parable of the prodigal son in the bible.
- Source: Wikipedia -

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24/10/2007