The verses are the 'Libera Me' part of the mass - a wonderfully Catholic sense of Apocalyptic transcendence. The chorus words are abut my regret that I didn't say goodbye to my father, and that I missed his final breath; I turned up several hours late to see a corpse. It's very, very strange. And bizarrely, English.

The drone of the song was a deliberate attempt to emphasise the mantra like quality…then more 'Umbadoo' chants to emphasise this, then a few words from the Pie Jesu, before the final Hindu acclamation:

O Fire, accept this body
O Fire Burn this body
Oh!

The final Oh! - is really meant to be a release into the Om, the perfect harmony, that leads to redemption.


Requiem Part 6: Libera Me (Free Me)

More desert noises, then the 'sugar milk' section; this is a reference to Lent - to the Mardi Gras (our pancake day) - a feast day before the abstinence of Lent. Lent celebrates when Christ went into the desert to be challenged before he headed into Jerusalem for his imminent Crucifixion. In many pan-cultural myths, Christ figures head into the desert  or the jungle to go mad, then be reborn with the strength to do the great act they were born to do; Luke Skywalker on Dagobah is a case in point.

then we have the words Gloria in excels is Deo - glory to God in the highest; the delayed guitars are meant to be a bit like church bells

then a Kyrie Eleison chant - which just means 'Lord Have Mercy On Me' which I then sing in English;

then the freak out metal bit - this is meant to express the madness that the person has to go through in this rite to emerge reborn.

Then Rowan speaking the words of Psalm 51; this is King David again begging God's forgiveness as he has killed the husband of Bethseba who he has been having an affair with. I love the self lacerating torture of these words.

then we hear modern day priests recorded in Lalibella, Ethiopia; King David's son Solomon had a fling with the Queen of Sheba; she ruled what is now Ethiopia; because of this affair, Judaism and then Christianity spread to Ethiopia; the priest we hear are the modern day descendants of this ancient Christian hybrid; in nearby Axum, there are rumours that this is where the Ark of the Covenant rests…!

finally we hear a Jain priest singing to me in a temple in Sravanabelagola; I've no idea what he's singing but I love it.

and then, as always, we return to the sound of the desert.


Requiem Part 5: Kyrie Eleison (Mercy)

The verses were written quickly when I cleared out my mother's house a few months after she died. For the second time in my life I hired a skip and chucked the accumulated possessions of someone's life brutally into it.

The bridge and chouses are the Lux Aeternum and Requiem Aeterum sections of the Requiem mass. It's a Psalm, written by King David, who founded the kingdom of Israel. It's about penance, which I'm not a big fan of, but also about surrendering yourself to transcendence, which I am. Om.

Requiem Part 4: Lux Aeturnum (Let Them Burn)

This is words of the Pie Jesu part of the Mass, mixed with my own words about my father; On the last morning I saw him alive, he was asleep on his bed. I lay down next to him and watched him sleep and struggle for breath. I have just been through a similar experience with my mother. You can smell death coming. It's what the troops in the WW1 trenches said - that choking gagging smell of death; I knew they were both going to die at this point; I could smell it. 

The 'O My Redeemer' bit is again about surrendering yourself to transcendence, through music, to find a redemption.


Requiem Part 3: Pie Jesu (Decay)

So in 1191, Edward I's wife Eleanor of Castille died in Lincoln. Edward was heartbroken. The cortege walked the body back to London. It took 12 days. At every place the cortege stopped, Edward built a stone cross in memory of his wife. Three still survive. The cross outside Charing Cross station is a cheesy Victorian replica after Oliver Cromwell knocked the first one down. The Taj Mahal is a mausoleum built by Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz. What bothers me is how rich men can erect preposterous memorial to deal with their grief, which we marvel at for centuries, whereas most people just die and are forgotten. There is something sick in the fact that the Taj - for all its beauty (I sat next to it once at sunrise) - was constructed by slave labourers, hundreds of whom died during the construction. Sublimity and blood are never far away. in 1997 I wandered up to the Mall to look at the flowers and the ululating ones mourning Princess Diana's death. One of the most surreal things I have ever seen. I have nothing against the lady, but the national mourning seemed medieval, and again, I wondered about all the other people that died that day, and didn't have the (mis?) fortune to have been married to a prince. I saw a link between her - the self-styled 'Queen of Hearts' and her ex-husband's ancestor Eleanor of Castille. I imagined that both Edward and Shah Jahan as self-imagined Christ figures. When one is grieving, one is incredibly selfish, and everybody let's you do it.

Requiem Part 2: Duodecim Cruces (Twelve Crosses)

We are all desert people. We all emerged from the desert and spread across the world.

Verse 1 is my adaption of a Hindu burial prayer - I wanted the (to me very healthy) Hindu attitude to death to contrast with the Christian one; burning a body seems to be a pretty good way to deal with death. By burning it, they are releasing the soul to God

Verses 2-4 are the Dies Irae from the Catholic Mass while the lead vocal recounts three times I encountered death - as a 10 year old boy, when I witnessed a plane crash; a few years later when I saw a suicide's dismembered body at Wimbledon station, and when I saw my father dead in a hospital bed.

'Umbadoo' chant; I wanted a Hindu like mantra chant to be a theme throughout the songs, and hit on this. It's just what came out of my mouth and felt right; Hindus believe that by chanting mantras you reach a state of transcendence and can touch the divine; you are in tune with the vibrations of the universe, with the one sound that all sounds come from: Om. Om seems to me to be what people mean when they talk about 'God'.

The Coda is my own words, focussing on rebirth; The King isn't Jesus but my father really; I just can't believe that my atoms don't get recycled in some way. This is not a resurrection coda, but a reincarnation one.


Requiem Part 1: Dies Irae (Wrath)

Why a Rock Requiem?

Grant graduated to proper rock opera in his teens when he discovered The Who's Tommy and Quardophenia albums and Pink Floyd's The Wall. In his twenties as part of pop band The Divine Comedy, he learned how to write and arrange a great song; and recently he has immersed himself in Medieval music and the requiems and passions of Bach, Verdi, Mozart and Britten. The result is his Rock Requiem. A piece for rock band and singers. Mixing Latin text with English liturgy, Hindu prayer and new divine writings, the piece is rooted in the Christian music tradition, but reaches out to those of other faiths, and those with no faith. At core it is about how epic music can lead us to redemption, and save us from the pain of grief. It is an urban, 21st Century Requiem.

"I have recently lost both my parents. Without realising it at first, the three big projects I have been working on are all about this desolation that we call 'grief'. First my rock opera 'Century' tried to reconnect with my father through retelling his family's story; then my book 'Cobras in the Rough' recounted my wanderings though India trying to piece him and me back together after he died. I started writing 'Requiem' as my mother was falling seriously ill with motor neurone disease. I didn't know why I was writing it. Now it makes perfect sense. 

'Grief' describes a mind in vertigo struggling to reshape itself around the void where your most fundamental certainties and anchors used to be. Music is like superglue in this process.

The Latin mass was the starting point to which I added English liturgy, Hindu prayer and my own writing. At core it is about how epic music can lead us to redemption, and save us from the pain of grief. 

We are desert people. Our religions emerged from desert people struggling with the harshest conditions, and bewildered by death. I am fascinated by faith. I heard the music I was creating as songs carried by the desert wind, half-heard fragments, like the echoes of the Big Bang that still resonate throughout the universe.

Music is the only truth. That and love.
 
Om.

"


Grant Gordon - Requiem