Peter Hammill: German Overalls

Mannheim: rainy Saturday with no money nor friend...
only Tequila can end the boredom.
Try to reach London for a pocket of hope;
we're children, we grope in the dark.
Hugh spends his last Mark on coffee and cheese...
I feel just like a refugee....
Rathaus-keepers and traffic police,
middle-aged maids with rotting teeth,
industrial magazines and old Sunday Times:
reading material/bleeding lines.
What are we doing here?

Memorial menace, eager for revenge,
has begun to bend our minds.
Shower-curtain imperative in the presence of acid;
now, feeling placid is death.
I try to hold my breath as the P.A. comes down....
here we all are in Ktown!
The Big Wheel never fails to grind around...
it drags me up/it drugs me down.
Seven senses wonder 'Can this be real,
Or am I become a performing seal?'
Why are we dying here?

I walk the streets alone, try to find a sign of love.
I've crushed the plaster-bone in the freaky clubs.
I have bit the fruit
but all I live for is to play
and I'm tired of the nights and the days
of airports, taxis and motorway showers,
groping for a key in the afterhours.
David takes to travelling in the van,
he knows that we all can understand:
we're at the mercy of the Kosmos tour,
making a pilgrimage to the German Lourdes...
but we're still crippled here.

Cathedrals spiral skywards; I think I'm getting vertigo.
I think I don't know what is real.
One more sudden spotlight; one more madness is over;
I must not show a sign of fear.
Words echo round my ears, I think I'm going to laugh...
think I'll just go and take a bath, guess I'll wash my clothes,
don't you know I'll grow to go and make my name,
maybe be a servant in the Famegame;
stake my sane and rest my life on the line....
Now lay me asunder and rend my mind;
at the fall of the curtain let this be my ghost.