Sweder Wrote:. . . the Stranglers rarely allowed hard facts to get in the way of a good song, but the lyric
I sell desert stretches like a big rubber glove
To Japan for a Nuclear Device
indicates (to me at least) that we wasn't so much swapping land for a bomb, rather selling the land for the Japs to test on. The line
All the animals look so strange
All victims of a testing range
seems to support this theory.
It's true that Bjelke-Petersen allowed massive tracts of land to be sold to Japanese developers, but I'll be buggered if I can find a nuclear connection. Lots of bands wrote anti-Bjelke songs, usually after a confrontation with the Queensland police, who (as was later proven by a Royal Commission) were rotten to the core, and acted as Bjelke-Petersen's political thugs. Street marches were banned in Queensland during those awful years, and I personally know one bloke who was arrested for merely making a slight pig noise in the vicinity of a Queensland policeman.
According to one newspaper article I came across, in the Stranglers' case the police jumped up on stage during a Stranglers' gig in a Brisbane pub, and a fight broke out when the cops tried to stop the performance. This was in the late 70s, when anything Bjelke-Petersen and his police thugs didn't like could be easily stopped because it nearly always constituted an "illegal gathering", which was a gathering of three or more people who did not have permission to do so. Queensland was in some ways worse than South Africa under apartheid. I was there briefly in 1979 (probably at the same time as The Stranglers, funnily enough), and I was horrified by the place. It was a very long time before I went back.
Sweder Wrote:Something I always liked about that track [Nuclear Device] was the clever interaction of the chorus at the end. The boys sing in a 'round' - like we did in school with Frere Jacques - and at one point the words overlap beautifully -
Getting rid of Abos one by one and
Way down under Australia
combine to make it sound like
Getting rid of Stranglers one by one
They didn't just throw this stuff together you know 
Clearly! Pretty clever stuff. You can check it out
here if you want to hear what we're rabbiting on about.
See? You can learn a whole heap of useful stuff here on
Running Commentary. From a perfect bacon sandwich recipe to political history and musicology.
Cool.
Audacious April.
