Lawrence in the desert

How was he to know?

Under so much pressure

from the men back home

Play with fire you must be mad

Are you only Jack the Lad?

Play with guns you must be bad

or hiding something, Jack

Telling lies in public

Breaking codes at home

Underneath the blankets

for another role

Tell these lies, you must be mad

Are you only Jack the Lad?

To feast with panthers every night

you must be careful, Jack

Don’t let them try to restrain you

This is your only religion

Don’t let them try to detain you

You’re not the only fool

We all fall, even Jack the Lad

We all fall, even Jack the Lad will fall

Philby in the desert

looking for a phone

waiting on the pavement

for a call from home

Play with fire you must be mad

Are you only Jack the Lad?

Turn your back on friends you had

They must have hurt you, Jack

Don’t let them try to restrain you

This is your only religion

Don’t let them try to detain you

You’re not the only fool

We all fall, even Jack the Lad

We all fall, even Jack the Lad will fall

1986. Big Audio Dynamite’s 1986 hit single, ‘E = MC2’, features samples from the film Performance including this one: ‘Who do you think you are, the Lone Ranger? You’re Jack the Lad!’ That suggested the title of this song to me. I thought of ‘Jack the Lad’ as a confident, rule-breaking, individualist maverick who is inevitably going to come to a sticky end. The examples I used weren’t chirpy Cockney villains but T. E. Lawrence and Kim Philby, one repressing his sexuality while leading an Arab revolt in the desert, the other covertly spying on his country for the Soviet Union from behind the façade of an intellectual. I owe the phrase ‘to feast with panthers’ to Oscar Wilde who wrote of his life before prison in De Profundis: ‘It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement.’