- 1
Peter Hammill - A Louse Is Not A Home
- 2
Peter Hammill - The Birds
- 3
Peter Hammill - Time For A Change
- 4
Peter Hammill - (No More) The Submariner
- 5
Peter Hammill - (On Tuesday She Used To Do) Yoga
- 6
Peter Hammill - A Better Time
- 7
Peter Hammill - A Forest Of Pronouns
- 8
Peter Hammill - A Headlong Stretch: i. Up Ahead
- 9
Peter Hammill - A Headlong Stretch: ii. Continental Drift
- 10
Peter Hammill - A Headlong Stretch: iii. The Twelve
- 11
Peter Hammill - A Headlong Stretch: iv. Long Light
- 12
Peter Hammill - A Headlong Stretch: v. Backwards Man
- 13
Peter Hammill - A Headlong Stretch: vi. As You Were
- 14
Peter Hammill - A Headlong Stretch: vii. Or So I Said
- 15
Peter Hammill - Again
- 16
Peter Hammill - Been Alone So Long
- 17
Peter Hammill - Candle
- 18
Peter Hammill - Child
- 19
Peter Hammill - Comfortable
- 20
Peter Hammill - Crying Wolf
- 21
Peter Hammill - Faint-Heart and the Sermon
- 22
Peter Hammill - Ferret And Featherbird
- 23
Peter Hammill - Fight
- 24
Peter Hammill - Forsaken Gardens
- 25
Peter Hammill - Four Pails
- 26
Peter Hammill - Gog
- 27
Peter Hammill - Happy
- 28
Peter Hammill - I Once Wrote Some Poems
- 29
Peter Hammill - Imperial Zeppelin
- 30
Peter Hammill - Just Good Friends
- 31
Peter Hammill - Lost And Found
- 32
Peter Hammill - Magog (In Bromine Chambers)
- 33
Peter Hammill - Man-Erg
- 34
Peter Hammill - Material Possession
- 35
Peter Hammill - Mediaevil
- 36
Peter Hammill - Mirror Images
- 37
Peter Hammill - Modern
- 38
Peter Hammill - Mr. X (Gets Tense)
- 39
Peter Hammill - My Experience
- 40
Peter Hammill - My Favourite
- 41
Peter Hammill - Nadir's Big Chance
- 42
Peter Hammill - Narcissus (Bar & Grill)
- 43
Peter Hammill - Nightman
- 44
Peter Hammill - No Moon In The Water
- 45
Peter Hammill - Nobody's Business
- 46
Peter Hammill - None Of The Above
- 47
Peter Hammill - Not For Keith
- 48
Peter Hammill - Not The Man
- 49
Peter Hammill - Nothing Comes
- 50
Peter Hammill - Now Lover
- 51
Peter Hammill - Now More Than Ever
- 52
Peter Hammill - Oasis
- 53
Peter Hammill - On The Surface
- 54
Peter Hammill - Open your Eyes (The Locarno Song)
- 55
Peter Hammill - Ophelia
- 56
Peter Hammill - Other Old Clichés
- 57
Peter Hammill - Our Oyster
- 58
Peter Hammill - Painting By Numbers
- 59
Peter Hammill - Palinurus (Castaway)
- 60
Peter Hammill - Paradox Drive
- 61
Peter Hammill - Patient
- 62
Peter Hammill - People You Were Going To
- 63
Peter Hammill - Personality
- 64
Peter Hammill - Phosphorescence
- 65
Peter Hammill - Planet Coventry
- 66
Peter Hammill - Pompeii
- 67
Peter Hammill - Porton Down
- 68
Peter Hammill - Power Of Speech
- 69
Peter Hammill - Primo on the Parapet
- 70
Peter Hammill - Pushing Thirty
- 71
Peter Hammill - Rain, 3 a.m.
- 72
Peter Hammill - Ram Origami
- 73
Peter Hammill - Re-Awakening
- 74
Peter Hammill - Red Shift
- 75
Peter Hammill - Reprise
- 76
Peter Hammill - Rock and Rôle
- 77
Peter Hammill - Rubicon
- 78
Peter Hammill - Sci-Finance
- 79
Peter Hammill - Seven Wonders
- 80
Peter Hammill - Sharply Unclear
- 81
Peter Hammill - She Wraps It Up
- 82
Peter Hammill - Shell
- 83
Peter Hammill - Shingle Song
- 84
Peter Hammill - Sign
- 85
Peter Hammill - Silver
- 86
Peter Hammill - Since The Kids
- 87
Peter Hammill - Sitting Targets
- 88
Peter Hammill - Skin
- 89
Peter Hammill - Sleep Now
- 90
Peter Hammill - Slender Threads
- 91
Peter Hammill - Smile
- 92
Peter Hammill - Solitude
- 93
Peter Hammill - Something About Ysabel's Dance
- 94
Peter Hammill - Still In The Dark
- 95
Peter Hammill - Still Life
- 96
Peter Hammill - Stranger Still
- 97
Peter Hammill - Stupid
- 98
Peter Hammill - Summer Song (In the Autumn)
- 99
Peter Hammill - Sun City Nightlife
- 100
Peter Hammill - Sunshine
- 101
Peter Hammill - Tapeworm
- 102
Peter Hammill - Tenderness
- 103
Peter Hammill - The Comet, The Course, The Tail
- 104
Peter Hammill - The Cut
- 105
Peter Hammill - The Future Now
- 106
Peter Hammill - The Gift of Fire (Talk Turkey)
- 107
Peter Hammill - The Great European Department Store
- 108
Peter Hammill - The Great Experiment
- 109
Peter Hammill - The Institute Of Mental Health, Burning
- 110
Peter Hammill - The Jargon King
- 111
Peter Hammill - The Lie (Bernini's St. Theresa)
- 112
Peter Hammill - The Light Continent
- 113
Peter Hammill - The Meanings Changed
- 114
Peter Hammill - The Moebius Loop
- 115
Peter Hammill - The Mousetrap (Caught In)
- 116
Peter Hammill - The Noise
- 117
Peter Hammill - The Old School Tie
- 118
Peter Hammill - The Play's The Thing
- 119
Peter Hammill - The Polaroid
- 120
Peter Hammill - The Second Hand
- 121
Peter Hammill - The Spirit
- 122
Peter Hammill - The Tower
- 123
Peter Hammill - The Unconscious Life
- 124
Peter Hammill - This Book
- 125
Peter Hammill - This Side Of The Looking Glass
- 126
Peter Hammill - Time Heals
- 127
Peter Hammill - Time To Burn
- 128
Peter Hammill - Too Many Of My Yesterdays
- 129
Peter Hammill - Traintime
- 130
Peter Hammill - Trappings
- 131
Peter Hammill - Two Or Three Spectres
- 132
Peter Hammill - Under Cover Names
- 133
Peter Hammill - Unrehearshed
- 134
Peter Hammill - Viking
- 135
Peter Hammill - Vision
- 136
Peter Hammill - Vote Brand X
- 137
Peter Hammill - What I Did
- 138
Peter Hammill - What's it Worth?
- 139
Peter Hammill - When Language Corrodes
- 140
Peter Hammill - Where The Mouth Is
- 141
Peter Hammill - Wilhelmina
- 142
Peter Hammill - You Can't Want What You Always Get...
- 143
Peter Hammill - You Hit Me Where I Live
- 144
Peter Hammill - Your Word
Fight
Peter Hammill
I alway forget how crazy things are
So sometimes it catches me off my guard
When they make sense
The line on the road trail the arrow in the sky
I search for the mote in my brother's eye
Beneath the pence
A time of blunt instruments
Still uncertain when I've woken
Or what constitutes a conscious mind
Though the thought remains unspoken
I know I'm flying blind
Breaking into cold sweat on the white-hot coals
The pennies from heaven drop through my soul
It don't relent
At the back end of dreams I'm amazed to awake
I offer my theories but just can't shake
That seventh sense
To which there's no defense
It seemed the time was for action
It seemed so cool to be that kind
My tongue writhed to form some retraction
But I knew
I was flying blind
I want things to be fast, down to the power-drive
I want the zero-gravity heroes to play dead
But stay alive
We want it to be slow, all the way to stall
We talk about a thousand things that never change at all
No, it never change
It was then that I knew I'd been thoughtless -
Something had slipped my mind
I'd strapped myself into the fortress
But the fortress was flying blind
We got full clearance, so someone down there
Ought to know the truth of our disappearance -
If even that still shows it accuses and blames me
But nothing was quite what it seemed
Sometimes things work out so strangely
That it might as well all be dreamed
The white cane fandango
The white cane fandango in morse code
Try to shake through the message
Shake the load
Only venial sin, running on the spot -
Till the dance begins
Where does a man go when the muscles cramp?
Try to write out a postcard on a postage stamp
With a drawing pin punching out the braille
For the whole within?
Upset the contango on your future stock
Paying backwardation, hold onto what you've got -
Such a sideways grin! Some day you may need
To trade that in
If we ride this right
The future will fall in our hands
If we survive the flight
The future will work out -
Nothing's that black and white
Control
The colour-coded charts are spread
But we're still gliding deep into the red
The radio is dead
Every valve blown open
The radar screen flicks monochrome
Air traffic controller wants to get on home
Waiting
For a phone call
To release him from responsibility
Nobody goes to see him any more
Except for the man from the ministry
He wanted to be, he wanted to be
The man at the helm, in command of the flightpath
He's flying a chair, quite beyond control
He's going to have just one more chance
At a barrel roll
All in a dream, all as a dream
The colours too bright, the music too deafening -
The black-out world has just begun to show
These cracked-out words I offer
But I still don't know
Cool blue suffuse the colour gun -
Oh come in, come in number one
Your time's nearly run
Speed-freeze the frame
The present and the past hold fast
It's too fast, the thing don't
The thing won't
The thing don't last
Cockpit
The rolling dice clash together never make up the score
That old device, the ejector seat, glued to the floor
Everybody waits for everyone to make a show -
No-one wants to be the first, admitting that they know
How anythings that's gone down here
Could fit into an analytic groove
W
Ait for the tactical move
Wait for some action we all can approve
Too much to drink, for the cup reaches down to the sea
Too much to think, the barometer pressuring me
Rolling down the weather for an easter parade
Reeling out the maydays in the hope of being saved
But the radio ham's out giving blood -
No, no, no, he's not listening
The cricketer knows his "wisden"
The pilot has got his "jane's"
But the sum of this factual wisdom
Don't help us to fly the plane
(No, and it never will...)
Beneath the tartan two-piece something rips undone
Wait for the ladder to run
Wait for the snake that the ladder becomes
A passenger hits the cockpit, willing to chance his game
Pulls out his gun and cocks it
In the hope that it all might change. (oh, but it never will...)
A fly-leaf from the library shows others have been here before
Tried, failed and kicked out the door
The aircrew don't care anymore -
Not they just wait
For the beat of the silk-worm wing
Wait for the heat to come down on us
- Full force of the law
Silk-worm wings
Full force of gravity pulls me down
I'll be better off out of there
Aerobatic spin around
I'll take my chances in the open air
Sycamore silk-worm wings
Or roman candle to the ground
There's only one thing for shure
When the balloon goes up
The aeronaut calm down
He say nothing is quite what it seems
He say nothing is quite what it seems
I say nothing is nothing
A black box
Softly, the angels sing their time and space refrain
There's something in everything if you can only pin down its name
Aerobatic thoughts at the back of my mind -
Is it nothing but the looping line we all follow?
Nothing but the spiral twist of dna
There'll be no looking back from tomorrow on today
So the wire is tripped, split-seconds defect to their successors
The umbilical cord is ripped -
Here we all are in free fall
I stall where I am, as if to see where I've been
Only running down the looping line we all follow
Only chasing down the spiral twist of dna -
There can be no looking on to tomorrow from today
Life/death/night/day - cold breath will surely fly away
Is the empire of sensation locked in a black box
Deep in me, encoded there somehow?
It fires the imagination to fly on a wing and a prayer
Through my life
- Is that how it is?
There'll be no looking back on this
This is now, which will be then -
Is this the means? All I know for shure is
This is the end
No looking back from tomorrow
No, there'll be no looking back on today
Better be looking on to tomorrow
Better think on today