From the recording Bowlahoola
AMBERGRIS
Because there are just not enough songs about whale shit (or maybe vomit: the jury's out, apparently). It floats on the water (known by sailors as Liquid Gold, gets steadily less shit-smelling and ends up as something people pay a fortune for because it adds something inimitable to perfumes. Very rare now.
It exists because whales eat squid sometimes and, unlike good old digestible KRILL (gotta love Krill) squid contain an intractibly hard-to-assimilate and... pass - beak. So if you wondered where all the squid beaks get to... (and who of us has not?) now you know. Ambergris.
I mean really, if you can't get a tune out of all that then, really, forget it
The groove was cooked up on the old Big Rig (of DAW-less machines) and is unusually jolly and major-key for me. Bit of a Carribean tip, I thought, which jives well with our Tale of the Sea and What Floats In It.
Lyrics
AMBERGRIS
...and they will come here for the quirky serpent
they will stay here for the harmless hen
and you will see if you are observant:
all that falls will Rise Again
you know I came here for the life of Reilly
I will stay till I don't know when
till the earth ... is scorched entirely
and the aliens say Amen
I believe in the root of the Wrong
I believe in its hooligan song
it's all just bringing out the beast in me
all the squid and cuttlefish and ambergris
let us confine ourselves to these examples
let's get conversant with the masterplan
I feel it's really all about the samples
we never got from the Monkey Man
I was swimming in the Holy Plasma
I was diving for the Floating Gold
you caught me weeping for the old miasma
(now i do as i am told)
There is life at the end of the prong
I believe as I muddle along
it stinks of matter and mortality
but it will get better like ambergris
hallucinated that the plane was crashing
Something intolerable would unfold
I had a vision of a endless cash-in
(that trope will never get old)
so i took the train to Bowlahoola
(it was so pretty in the early Spring)
No season could be crueller
(the raw sorrow at the centre of things)
I believe in the root of the Wrong
you will see when the horror has gone
it sucks unbearably but you can see
it's all significant as ambergris
there is life at the end of the prong
I believe as I muddle along
it stinks of matter and mortality
but it will get better like ambergris
I believe in the Scallop of God
In the Life of the Cephalopod
this shipwreck praxis is no place for me:
all flotsam, derelict and ambergris
I believe in the root of the Wrong
you will see when the horror has gone
it sucks unbearably but you can see
it's all significant as ambergris