HENRY COW
Complete Works


  • Came To See You (F.Frith)
  • No More Songs (P.Ochs)
  • Would You Prefer Us To Lie ? (C.Cutler/J.Greaves)
  • Erk Gah (T.Hodgkinson)
  • On Suicide (B.Brecht/H.Eisler)

  • CAME TO SEE YOU
    Words and Music
    by Fred Frith
    [1972]

    I came to see you today
    But you weren't at home
    So I decided to go for a walk instead
    I hope you had a lovely day
    Successful in every way
    But please don't think I'm trying to interfere
    Or wonder what I'm doing here outside your door
    It always led to complications

    Well, hello, it seems a long time
    Since we spent a few months
    Living here together
    And if a month is not forever
    That's the way it seemed then

    Even so, like everything it ended
    Even though there was no special reason
    It just seemed out of season
    But it doesn't matter cause it had to happen

    I need you now
    More than I ever think I did before
    In all the time I've known you
    And if you think that it's outgrown you
    Don't believe us

    I suppose it should be long forgotten
    Ending be, I shouldn't be remembering
    Things that are not in henning
    Doubt that it's about left but I'm wondering

    I came to see you today
    But you weren't at home
    So I decided to go for a walk instead
    I hope you had a lovely day
    Successful in every way
    But please don't think I'm trying to interfere
    Or wonder what I'm doing here outside your head
    It always led to complications


    RAPT IN A BLANKET
    Words and Music
    by Fred Frith
    [1972]

    I can't seem to get near you
    On these cold days
    Sitting wrapped in a blanket
    Staring at the fire
    But it's good to be alone
    And sometimes you can't be around at all
    In your mind, when you decide to be

    I can't seem to get near you
    Sitting in a room full of people
    But it's good to be around
    Cause sometimes you can't be alone at all
    In your mind, when you decide to be


    NINE FUNERALS OF THE CITIZEN KING
    Words and Music
    by Tim Hodgkinson
    [1973]

    Down beneath the spectacle of free
    No one ever let you see
    The Citizen King
    Ruling the fantastic architecture of the burning cities
    Where we buy and sell...

    That the Snark was a Boojum all can tell
    But a rose is a rose is a rose
    Said the Mama of Dada as long ago as 1919

    You make arrangements with the guard
    Halfway round the exercise yard
    To sugar the pill
    Disguising the enormous double-time the king pays to Wordsworth
    More than you or I could reasonably forfeit the while...
    Double-time the king pays to Wordsworth
    More than you or I could reasonably buy...

    If we live, we live to tread on dead kings
    Or else we'll work to live to buy the things we multiply
    Until they fill the ordered universe


    BEAUTIFUL AS THE MOON...
    Words by Chris Cutler, Music
    by Fred Frith
    [1975]

    Careworn and all alone - First Days
    Charon the unborn - Days erased
    Death: Venus unfurled -
    The world we lost we found - spoiled
    No sun No birds No stars No form

    Evened we are fallen all before time
    Lief lorn we unlearn all crime
    Lives - levelled as lies
    A star mourns souls ungraved - ignored
    Slow wheels: Mira, Algol, Maia

    Rose Dawn Daemon
    Rise Up and seize the morning - your due
    Love solves worlds - with words
    Arise Amidnight and heaven stumbles -
    as time ends

    Last days hollow souls view
    Glass maze as science sees us through
    History moulds men
    Selves men made
    its tyrannies end when
    its ghosts are laid

    Dark Class marches past to war
    Class cause carries all before
    Capital steals Fire
    Fools no more
    his factories free dreams
    his Kings expire

    Rose Dawn Day Moon,
    Take Care! Banners of Crimson are raised
    Time solves words - by deeds
    Arise work men and seize the future
    Let Ends Begin


    LIVING IN THE HEART OF THE BEAST
    Words and Music
    by Tim Hodgkinson
    [1975]

    Situation that rules your world - despite all you've said
    I would strike against it but the rule displaces...
    There I burn in my own lights fuelled with flags
    torn out of books and histories
    of marching together, united with heroes, we were the rage, the fire.
    But I was given a different destiny - knotted in closer despair.
    Calling to heroes, do you have to speak that way all the time ?
    Tales told by idiots in paperbacks;
    a play of forms to spite my fabulous need to fight and live.

    We exchange words, coins, movements
    - paralysed in loops of care that we hoped could knot a world still.
    Sere words, toothless, ruined now, bulldozed into brimming pits
    - who has used them how? Grammar book that lies wasted :
    conflux of voices rising to meet, and fall,
    empty, divided, other...

    Clutching at sleeves the wordless man exposes his failure :
    smiling, he hurls a wine glass, describing his sadness twisted
    into mere form : shattered in a glass, he's changed...
    How dare he seize the life before him
    and discompound it in sulphurous confusion and give it to the air?
    He's rushing to find where there's a word of liquid syntax
    - signs let slip in a flash : "clothes of chaos are my rage !"
    he shrieks in tatters, hunting the eye of his own storm.

    We were born to serve you all our bloody lives
    labouring tongues we give rise to soft lies :
    disguised metaphors that keep us in a vast inverted silliness
    twice edged with fear.
    Twilight signs decompose us
    High in offices we stared into the turning wheel of cities
    dense and ravelled close yet separate : planned to kill all encounter.
    Intricate we saw your state at work
    its shapes abstracted from all human intent.
    With our history's fire we shall harrow your signs.

    Now is the time to begin to go forward - advance from despair,
    the darkness of solitary men - who are chained in a market they cannot control -
    in the name of a freedom that hangs like a pall on our cities.
    And their towers of silence we shall destroy.

    Now is the time to begin to determine directions,
    refuse to admit the existence of destiny's rule.
    We shall seize from all heroes and merchants our labour, our lives, and our practice of history :
    this, our choice, defines the truth of all that we do.

    Seize on the words that oppose us with alien force;
    they're enslaved by the power of capital's kings
    who reduce them to coinage and hollow exchange in the struggle to hold us,
    they're bitterly outlasting...
    Time to sweep them down from power - deeds renew words.

    Dare to take sides in the fight for freedom that is common cause
    let us all be as strong and as resolute.
    We're in the midst of a universe turning
    in turmoil; of classes and armies of thought
    making war - their contradictions clash and echo through time.


    NO MORE SONGS
    Words and Music
    by Phil Ochs

    Hello, hello, hello,
    Is there anybody home?
    I've only called to say I'm sorry
    The drums are in the dawn
    and all the voices gone
    And it seems that there are no more songs

    Once I knew a girl
    She was a flower in a flame
    I loved her as the sea sings sadly
    Now the ashes of the dream
    Can be found in the magazines
    And it seems that there are no more songs

    Once I knew a sage
    Who sang upon the stage
    He told about the world, his lover
    A ghost without a name
    Stands ragged in the rain
    And it seems that there are no more songs

    The rebels they were here
    They came beside the door
    They told me that the moon was bleeding
    Then all to my surprise
    They took away my eyes
    And it seems that there are no more songs

    A star is in the sky
    It's time to say goodbye
    A whale is on the beach, he's dying
    A white flag in my hand
    And a white bone in the sand
    And it seems that there are no more songs

    Hello, hello, hello,
    Is there anybody home?
    I've only called to say "I'm sorry"
    The drums are in the dawn
    And all the voices gone
    And it seems that there are no more songs

    It seems that there are no more songs
    It seems that there are no more songs


    WOULD YOU PREFER US TO LIE?
    Words by Chris Cutler, Music
    by John Greaves
    [1976]

    Would you prefer us to lie ?
    Treat what we do as a separate function
    to life ?
    Worlds apart,
    Our worlds are just the same
    And all we do,
    we do in order that order might change


    ERK GAH
    Words and Music
    by Tim Hodgkinson
    [1976]

    Part One

    Sentenced to death
    it is time
    it is precious breath I've spent
    all these cold years
    waiting for the choice
    that's never nearer.

    In my dreams
    I walk past stumbling men
    confused by shouting
    they're bleeding on the pavement
    I walk past a man
    who seems slightly pale :
    why did I choose this street
    that turns cold?

    Rooms have bare walls
    that stare at what remains:
    how much I've hated all our
    wretched tight-lipped differences,
    building up
    to breaking point, or compromise.

    Once I felt we could relive our love
    but then it became clear
    feelings were dead.
    Then, you ask, why did I choose this room
    that turns cold?
    why do I choose this way of dying?

    Time comes to lash and destroy in fury
    each moment of time draws me nearer:
    I shall not be measured beyond
    death and all the darkest time eternal stands
    and hurls me forwards: anguished shall
    strike these hollow times short with fury.

    Part Two

    That I carried a smile was not in doubt;
    they were just not sure why.

    Running along the street, it's time;
    I left them thinking;
    who was that girl we thought we knew?

    There was not much to do; fingerprints
    planted led to quick arrest and trial;
    I confessed.

    One year ago was when it happened;
    how hard they try to forget my smile.

    Part Three

    I was flying kites
    when I could be trying hard at school;
    all summer long, twisting, turning and
    marching on telegraph poles
    I lay stretched out for miles
    saw ten thousand teachers
    drag the sky down with fear of failure
    and shreds of reason.

    See in the garden a child
    will she be the same as today?
    the storm of the world crashing
    on my lips and eyes and eardrums
    cries out to end them all
    and dream of nothing

    Memories made of air
    last no longer than seconds

    Voices quickly melt into distances
    fearful the shadows of sound, exiled
    now my friends put on
    the cruel masks of the beast
    who would stay to ask them questions?
    don't you know that
    all the human race is dumb?
    it never spoke and never will
    I search for my friends
    in the monstrous stomach of this silence
    cry for my friends in the endless spaces.
    now my tongue forgts and freezes
    engraved with cyphers
    stripped of word of cry
    I turn forever, beating circles
    hollow frozen wheels that witness nothing.

    Part Four

    I break open stars finding nothing
    and again nothing and again nothing
    then one word in a foreign tongue
    one unknown word

    Part Six

    Now feel the fire that burns the sun
    by this fire our time will be won
    I believe in humankind
    self whose fear whose darkness lies
    before us: we stand here with open eyes
    no more gods shake tyrant halls
    fling thunder and lightning down
    at our side, to make stone sing.


    ON SUICIDE
    Words by Bertholt Brecht, Music by Hanns Eisler

    In such a country, and at such at time
    There should be no melancholy evenings
    Even high bridges over the rivers
    And the hours between the night and morning
    And the long long winter time as well
    All these are dangerous !
    For in view of all the misery
    People just throw, in a few seconds time
    Their unbearable lives away