Momus - Broken To Joking lyrics

Said Broken to Joking
Where do you think they're going
In all those cars? Said Joking to Broken
Cling film! Cling film! Book now! Book now!
Freephone! Freephone! Clean and disposable!

Where are you hiding Mr Kaspar Hauser
Now that we need you like a hole in the head?
In cities the world over we're
Now walking in your trousers
As the lights, like Werther's waistcoat
Go from blue to red

Read Charivari, subscribe to Simplicimuss
Right on on the tube behind
The duck in chains
If we all spit together we
Can flood the Circus Maximus
Catch a seat, babble
Settle back for the games

Peter the Great is sitting
Stabbing at the clavicord
While nose against the window
Stands Pierrot Lunaire
Casios compute a possibility of unicorns
Christopher Robin is saying his prayers

Sick of the gods means dropping the pilot
And sending small opinions to the Barry Tooks
So turn a blind eye to the ultraviolet
Shame the rastafarians, burn all the books

Half the world is suffering
From boredom and bulemia
Flaubert licks the pear shaped
Arse of Louis Philippe
The other half pines with anorexia nervosa
Providing technicolor for Miss Merryl Streep

Poisonous prime ministers and monsters
Of the underground
Are dragging us along on our thalydomide legs
Cambridge academics guzzle pickled onions
And they vomit on their copies of
'The Way Of All Flesh'

Yves St Laurent unveils
The Protest Collection
Cute cut duffle coats with toggles of gold
Why ban the bomb? It's
Just America's erection
Stories of the sandman we just
Love to be told

At forty paces Spartacus still
Looks a little threatening
Chinese paper dragons execute
The sharpest turns
But no Harley Street quack
Will prescribe breast feeding
To a land that feels angina in it's heartburn

Remember Anton Webern
The most delicate of Serialists
Shot after curfew by the yankee cook Bell
But don't call those
Americans cultural imperialists
Because United Technologies sponsor
Rossini's 'William Tell'

Said Broken to Joking
Where do you think they're going
In all those cars? Said Joking to Broken
Cling film! Cling film! Book now!
Freephone! Freephone! Clean and disposable!
You won't catch those executives
Catching a cancer
They're working on their bodies
Getting fit for life
There's so many diseases but only one answer
We'll be lucky to get out of this world alive

Fyodor Dostoyevsky facing the blanks again
How does it feel, your execution was a cheat?
If you promise to quit your treasonous pranks
Then you can sing us the
Song of the falling sleet

Where's your sense of fun all
You inhabitants of bulletins
Prisoners of conscience where's your
Famous comic touch?
So blame it all on Johann Sebastian Skeleton
Betray him under torture, boys
He won't mind much

Me I do the police in the different voices
And the make-up turns me into Sweeney Todd
But, I'm just a simple banker, boys
Giving loans for Rolls Royces
A chi chi atheist looking for God

A brother and sister are smashing a mirror
And the shrapnel turns the
Brother into his eyes
From the world from that from that moment on
All the world can do is shiver
All the brothers icy, all the sisters cry

Says Broken to Joking