3:54
Three Songs, 1981
Written by Alec Bathgate and Chris Knox
I really love the Elf Power version of this song (it's more fierce and exuberant), but this is the original. It's stripped-back, lo-fi, and has a slow, almost menacing tempo, and the song is quite dark and cynical, speaking to a general sense of alienation and ennui. A primitive guitar riff, a shaken tambourine, some ghostly "la la la"s. Perhaps, the narrator muses, at some point somewhere children might be entranced "Because of some beauty / That has not been altered, damned or pointed out / By the clumsy dark oafs that train them." But then again...