This Is How It Was

This is life like it was 1978 And the music’s great John Peel on the radio Plays a dub plate And despite the despair Strikes everywhere Its a brave new world For those who care They told us at school We’d amount to nothing Selling deckchairs on the beach Success out of reach Muggy Boneheads from London With their casual’s hair Bank Holiday Monday Better take care Jimmy Savile at the Maison Taking kids upstairs Everyone knows But nobody cares The England Mascot Was also a nonce Made governor of my school Despite prison once Stealing our lunch from BHS Gotta eat something Get out of this mess Chilling with the Mekon A secret crush Wanting to be Kerouac But not be a lush Opening for Bauhaus And Killing Joke Getting ready to move Up to the Smoke
 4AD records would sign my band But I was only 14 and they didn’t understand But Revenge can be a very cold dish I took the girlfriend off the guy from Modern English Hearing Chet Baker on Radio 2 So I left my band to be a jazz man too Escaping home at fifteen years old Off to the City In search of fame and of gold Smoking reefer in a squat in Powys Square Put me off pot I was really a square On the All Saints Road you better beware But if you were here for the stuff they didn’t really care Shopping every week on some stolen card Back in those days it wasn’t so hard Ripping off the banks We’ll never pay them back For any kind of scam we sure had the knack We bought luxury goods and classic cars We got the cards by stealth Then the money was ours I even had a fake African child Drove the Welfare insanely wild This is what you get for being left behind When the teachers called us dummies And caned our behinds Every day at school was like that movie NEDs Getting whacked by teachers and then by skinheads Living in squalor in an Earls Court squat With a piss head cripple who did a coke a lot He set fire to the flat when he was asleep Firemen came and were freaked by the creep Threw his bed out the top floor window It was so covered in piss and the damage final But the fire didn’t reach my precious vinyl Running off to Brazil in the early 90s Living the high life with Rio celebrities Felt so good to have a new identity But reaching 30 with nothing done Time to knuckle down stop all this fun Gotta make some money so I won’t care I can’t die broke its just not fair Getting diagnosed with ADHD And the autism bit made sense to me If it wasn’t for being on my med Pretty sure my music would just be still in my head...