The man at the back of the queue was sent
To feel the smack of firm government
Lingered by the fly poster for a fight
It’s the same story every night
I’ve been hurt and we’ve been had
You leave home and you don’t go back
Someone told me Monday, someone told me Saturday
Wait until tomorrow and there’s still no way
Read it in a book or write it in a letter
Wake up in the morning and there’s still no guarantee
Only last night I found myself lost
by the station called King’s Cross
Dead and wounded on either side
You know it’s only a matter of time
I’ve been good and I’ve been mad
I’ve been guilty of hanging around
Someone told me Monday, someone told me Saturday
Wait until tomorrow and there’s still no way
Read it in a book or write it in a letter
Wake up in the morning and there’s still no guarantee
So I went looking out today
for the one who got away
Murder walking round the block
ending up in King’s Cross
Good luck, bad luck waiting in a line
It takes more than the matter of time
Someone told me Monday, someone told me Saturday
Wait until tomorrow and there’s still no way
Read it in a book or write it in a letter
Wake up in the morning and there’s still no guarantee
1986. A hymn for the rejects of Thatcherism. I first arrived at King’s Cross station in London in the summer of 1972, having caught the train down from Newcastle to go to a college interview. King’s Cross is also the name of the area surrounding the station, which, by the mideighties, was a destination for homeless people, drug dealers, prostitutes of both sexes and their clients (Neil Jordan’s 1986 film Mona Lisa gives a good picture of it). Meanwhile people from Scotland and the North still disembarked from trains at the station. Homeless people living on the streets were a sad new phenomenon in Thatcherite London (see also ‘The theatre’), and King’s Cross felt to me like a metaphor for the era with its transient promises and bleak despair. The song was released in 1987 and shortly afterwards there was a lethal fire in King’s Cross underground station in which thirty-one people were killed. The lines ‘Dead and wounded on either side / You know it’s only a matter of time’ resonated eerily.