News in this city
breaks without pity
Long after the war has ended
we’re still in fatigues
Up against it
The higher you fly
the further you fall
Up against it
wondering why
we fought after all
Such a cold winter
with scenes as slow as Pinter
Synchronise your watches
there’s still time to kill
Up against it
Drinking this swill
to sweeten the pill
Up against it
The more that it hurts
the less that it works
Wrapped in nostalgia
to queue for a show
Back to Trafalgar
One kiss then I’ll go
So deep in quicklime
the bones of an old crime
I knew a man who raked them over
Up against it
Buried so deep
it gives me the creeps
Up against it
The longer you hate
the more that it grates
Up against it
Look left then right
and run for your life
1995. A journey through post-war Britain. More inspiration from the bookcase. The playwright Joe Orton was commissioned in 1967 to write a screenplay for the Beatles, intended as the follow-up to their film Help!, but it was never produced. He called it Up Against It and I have a copy of the published version of the script and borrowed the title for this song. (In the same bookcase is a collection of short stories by Noël Coward called To Step Aside which gave me the title for another song on the same album. You gotta take it where you can find it …) I had been reading a history of London after the Second World War and was thinking about how, through so much of the post-war period, people had been urged to tighten their belts and work hard to achieve a utopia which never quite emerged. The famously cold winter of 1947 is mentioned in the first verse. The lines, ‘So deep in quicklime / the bones of an old crime’ refer to the skeletons of the murdered Romanovs which had been recently discovered and dug up. The murder of the Romanovs happened at the beginning of the Bolshevik terror which destroyed the morality of utopian communism just as it achieved power.