kiyomori
MAD
(Original composition by Crispin Cairns. Lyrics Adam Kidd, additional music and arrangement Kiyomori.)

No more cold wars, cos all your foes trigger pulls
Must be unthinkable terrorist acts not a resistance force
Only the West makes war, we are the liberators
Now you are free. Free... Free...

Until a great flash outside, black clouds fill the sky
Soon they'll react. They planted their blue peacocks long ago,
For a few precious miles of soil.
There will be innocents who are caught in the crossfire
Caught in the crossfire... Caught in the crossfire

Better than that, we're better than that, we're better man
Better than that, we're better than that, we're better and
Better than that, we're better than that, we're better man
Better than that, we're better than that, we're better and
I wanna say I wanna say nothing to you
You mutually assure our destruction
I wanna say, I wanna say nothing to you
You mutually assure our destruction

Notes: Adam: Kiyomori was going to be Crispin and my baby, but, as is often the case in love and music, things didn't quite work out! Crispin and I had gone to Cornwall in December 2003 to work on songs for Kiyomori, it was there that we decided on the name.

We were playing each other lots of songs, old, unfinished and new ideas trying to figure out what sort of sound we wanted to have. I fell in love with Crispin's track MAD, which had been an instrumental for his old band at Blackpool University. Ben loved it too and we set about making a demo pretty much as soon as we'd gotten back.

Crispin already had the title: Mutually Assured Destruction, and wanted to pepper the track with samples about nuclear war. I wrote the lyrics about the folly of war. The Bush Administration, Afghanistan and Iraq were very topical, of course, and I wanted to put across the idea that the 'War on Terror' could be seen as pretty much a continuation of the Cold War. Fighting an unseen opponent. I was trying to say that 'terror' is a brand, soldiers fighting against Western troops to defend their own countries, regardless of their ideology, are resisting invasion. They are being terrorised, not the other way around. I found it a bit odd that America's reaction to being bombed by Al Quaida was to bomb first Afghanistan then Iraq.

The Blue Peacock line is about an article I read in the New Scientist, about a secret British Military plan to plant nuclear mines (which they affectionately named blue peacocks) in Germany. For the full article you'll have to subscribe to New Scientist, but here's a little taster:

IT COULD only have happened at the height of cold war paranoia. To counter the threat of Soviet invasion, the UK planned to bury 10 huge nuclear landmines in Germany, declassified army documents from the 1950s reveal.

The extraordinary weapon was designed to cause mass destruction and radioactive contamination over a wide area to prevent an occupation by Soviet forces. Each mine was expected to produce an explosive yield of 10 kilotons, about half that of the atom bomb the US dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945.

The mines were to be left buried or submerged by the British Army of the Rhine. They would then have been detonated by wire from up to 5 kilometres away or by an 8-day clockwork timer. If disturbed or damaged, they were primed to explode within 10 seconds... New Scientist 19th July 2003

Now really, we should be better than that!


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