Savannah

(Blegvad/Partridge)

Orpheus - The Lowdown

Recordings Art Lyrics Chords and Tablature

Recordings

1. Album version.
   Performed by Peter Blegvad and Andy Partridge.
   Released on 23 February 2004 on the Peter Blegvad and Andy Partridge album Orpheus - The Lowdown in the U.K.

Art

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Lyrics

Another day dawns on the savannah. The wind sighs in the antlers of a few static deer, a coyote howls. Aside from that, the savannah is becalmed and blue as smoke through the lens of the substantial air. The camera pans in. Here, hidden by a few cans and rags, is the dilapidated paper shack of the only person alive. The wind rustles the walls which are thousand dollar bills, the currency of some vanished culture, patiently sewn together by the shack's snoring tenant: Orpheus, the poet - a patchwork himself after his sparagmos.

Opening his eyes, Orpheus remembers he has bet the gods that he can build a city on the savannah by night fall. He has twelve hours. He gets out of bed naked and walks out into the morning sun and starts to build.

First he builds the throats of singers, with lungs one end and tongues the other, and he builds a whole choir of these to accompany his labour with song. Then he builds a post office. And an underground or subway system. A whole shanty town of paper shacks goes up around the post office which, by noon, is milling with dead letter ghosts come up from the underground to engage in nightmare horseplay.

The soft embryonic city has hardened by dusk, and as the sun sets the young windows light up and lead the way home for any stragglers still abroad in these last minutes before curfew. Anyone on the streets after curfew will be unmade, like a bed.

[ Orpheus washes his hands in tears and thus anointed calls it a day though it is night. ]

Darkness falls on the savannah.

Orpheus sleeps.

Chords and Tablature

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