A reflection on brutal home demolitions by the Israeli forces in the Massafer Yatta area of the South Hebron Hills in Israeli occupied Palestine on Sunday 18 October 2020

A Crime Against Humanity

Nick on flamenco guitar, Graham Gynn on tres/quatro. Pete Fox percussion. Recorded Dec. 2015 in Penzance, Cornwall.

TARANTOS

There's now a better mix on my album 'The Game of London': https://davidaharley.bandcamp.com/track/london-1983-heatwave 

Also available from the usual streaming sources: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/davidharley/further-off-the-record 

Words and Music by David Harley [All Rights Reserved]

There’s a heatwave in the city and the day drags on forever
The tarmac burns through patent leather
Clear through to the sole
Ice tumbles through glass as the temperature soars
And the day-shift leaves the night-shift to take over for a while

The city sings at midnight to the well-fed and the civilized
While waiters mop their faces in the kitchen, out of sight
Small change pours in torrents over counters in the bistros
And the moon hangs red and sullen in the dustbowl of the sky

The city is on heat, bare-legged girls in summer dresses
Dodge the lechery of workmen laying cable through the day
But the night turns on the body to sweet pornography
Passions feed on darkness and the body mutes the mind

The city squeals at midnight in its pain and ecstasy
The life-force surges through the veins and soaks the sheets
The couples claw and couple and feed upon each other
And still the hunger rages through the streets

I saw a refugee from Galway with a faceful of stubble
Singing sentimental songs in the underground today
He’s going back to Mother Ireland and the Mountains of Mourne
And he only needs a bob or two to help him on his way

The city whimpers at midnight in its apathy and squalor
From a bench on the Embankment, from a derry in Barnes
From a squat in Deptford, from the winos and the junkies
From the homeless and the helpless, the hopeless and the lost

A refugee from Calvary is preaching anarchy and anger
Through his 40 Megawatt PA
And when the concert’s over he packs his guitars and prophecies
And goes back to his hotel to drink the night into the day

But out there in the streets the word is out all over
The heat are out for action in New Cross and Ladbroke Grove
The temperature is dropping but the tempers are at flashpoint
And no-one lingers on street corners if they’re walking home alone

The city screams at midnight in the agony of anger
The rocksteady revolution pays its homage to its dead
Where dreadlocks meet deadlock the shock tears up the flagstones
And on their righteous anger the riot squads are fed

The Klan charts fiery crosses cloistered in an upstairs room
The architects of reaction spin their bitter webs
Entangling and exploiting the kids with skinhead hairstyles
And no-one dares explain the chaos in their heads

(This half-verse won't be in the final version)
[A Pakistani youth lies bleeding in the gutter
A Jamaican girl is raped behind a dockyard wall
Black and white scrawl their frustrations in blood across the charge-sheets
A copper clutches at his stomach where a flick-knife said it all]

The city burns at midnight and the blood runs down the sewers
In the ghettoes and the side-streets where the patriots have been
Squad cars and an ambulance cut through the aftermath
And tomorrow’s front pages unfurl to set the scene

David Harley: Vocal, acoustic guitar, banjo, electric lead guitar, 5-string banjo
James Bolam (no, not that James Bolam!): piano
Engineer Steve Hall

More information at http://davidharleysongs.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/heatwave/

Heatwave In The City (London 1983)

Waiting Around To Die

To A Woman

I know you came from another land
Or you fell from Cupids wing
I know I saw it in those eyes
The hazel and the chestnut groves
Your flowing hair,your sweet perfume
The way you sweetly sing

Hold your hand to my heart
Feel it pounding for you
Just to be in your presence
Will have to satisfy me

You intoxicate my mind
Yet soothe my aching soul
But to go beyond the boundaries
Would just be too unkind

Now I must be satisfied 
With little more than hope
Living in the present
With a love sick heart

There's never a tomorrow
It's another day away
And so my love will never die
And I can hear myself say

I want what I don't have
Desire the love I can't have
Cherish the love I do have

Ian Semple©2015 

To A Woman

This was done with the old Rocketnetwork. It's a collaboration with Kjell from Sweden and I'm not sure but perhaps Steve Pearce on bass...lyrics are mine and slide guitar music was Kjell

Don't Look Back

Collaboration between myself and Julie Carter's Whyte Rabbit.....

Song of the Butterfly

flamenco guitar, cuatro and percussion weaving and entwining musical ideas around each other 

02. Otro Expresso

Recorded at my home one blurry Sunday with the funniest kindest man I've ever had the pleasure to meet....

Take A Child

I wrote this poem for a dear friend of mine who lives in the village of Salem near Nablus in Israeli occupied Palestine. Yasmeen has been blind from birth. She has achieved much academically, with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and a Masters in Applied Linguistics and Translation

For Ikhlas (Yasmeen) Jebara Eshtaya
Me 

What do I experience 
In my world without sight?
The shape of feelings?
The sounds within me
Changing, shifting? 
The spaces where I breathe and move?
How, you ask, is memory defined?
Is it the sounds of long ago?
The universal pitch of a mother’s song?
The taste of her breath?
The smell of a father, home from a working day?
Voices of love and safety
Who breathe their kisses on my face?
The love that came pouring out to me
At that first meeting with my parents?
Mediated by the conditions endured beyond the darkness in my head.

I remember the father I touched and smelled and loved,
The shape of his unshaven face
The sound of “habibti” in my ears.
His love, his touch, his care, his laughter.
I remember my pain
No eyes necessary to feel,
To expect to be secure.
A brutal occupying force has ripped away my safety.
Baba, ‘Abu Ikhlas’, lost to me,
To my mother, “Umm Ikhlas”,
To my siblings.

A cloud has appeared.
It is darkening.
Should bitterness consume my being?
No! In my heart I burn with hope.
It manifests itself in my learning and achievements.

Words. 
These symbols which create understanding
Of happiness and tragedy.
I long to teach, to share
To demonstrate how the possible becomes real.

How do I see the world now?
I am a woman who contemplates the possible,
Who celebrates the beauty of knowledge,
Who preserves the humility that tempers expectation,
Who inspires,
Who energises,
Who expresses feeling,
Who shows love.

I see me.
For Ikhlas (Yasmeen) Jebara Eshtaya
By David Clinch

'Me' by Dave Clinch (For Yasmeen)

Jonathan Davidson's poem, Borders, read by his daughter Mollie Davidson. Recorded in Spring 2020.

A Commonplace

Borders (European version), Poem by Jonathan Davidson, read by Mollie Davidson

Singer/songwriter/guitarist, now emerging from a long career in IT security and hoping to raise money to record a commercial CD, since gigging isn't an option right now. In the meantime, there are some tracks recorded in the 80s and other home-recorded tracks floating around.