It was recorded a year before the current pandemic, but the third and finest single from new version Dead Famous People is as appropriate as any anthem for today will be. Multiple messages and meanings can be contrived from the lyrics, but to state it more crudely than the song does . . . we’ve really fucked a lot of shit up lately, haven’t we?
Stream or download ‘Dead Bird’s Eye’
Despite hooliganistic tropes of beating up boys, wrecking cars and turning up late and filthy to family weddings in gleeful defiance of social norms, in the finest Dead Famous People songs, the narrator’s parents are always lurking around the corner. Here, despite the direction of the singer’s plea, that isn’t as certain the case. It’s a little scary. It should be.
Music aficionados cherish those artists whose thoughts and expressions seem out of their time, but there are generally hints of an era gone by which create a sort of comfortable distance. Ponder it all you want, but twenty-six dollars wouldn’t get you so much uptown these days, and that wouldn’t have been you anyhow. Dead Famous People aren’t romanticists nor fantasists like that. They sing openly about awkward stages and unpleasant situations of naïveté and false bravado which most people work hard to forget. They’re funny that way. It’s always entertaining when it’s someone else’s adolescence, right?
Dead Bird’s Eye is something else – a look back at the decisions we make and try not to face, but which end up haunting us in ways we couldn’t perceive earlier. It’s Dons’ favourite song on the new album but it’s the one that seemed less likely to find a time and place than the other nine songs on the album. But here we are, living indoors and working at home if we can work at all, worrying about systems and procedures and safeguards that we hadn’t given a moment’s thought to previously.
So welcome to 2020! Dead Famous People’s album, “Harry”, will be released in October and it features nine other songs not anywhere near as heavy as this one.
DEAD BIRD’S EYE – LYRICS
Look at the fires, the storms are raging wild, the ocean cries aloud,
Oh how she cries, oh how she tires, tires of all our taking . . .
When you have more, more than you want for but you go on,
Wanting more and more and more and more, there is a law,
It’s written in the sky
It’s there in the tear of a dead bird’s eye
What have we done mother?
Slapped you in the face of your grace mother,
on behalf of the whole human race mother
I’m sorry mother, I’m sorry mother
You look sad mother
Your head now it hangs
You’re in rags mother
On behalf of the whole human race mother
I’m sorry mother
I’m sorry mother
It’s growing late mother
Can I wipe the years from
On your face mother?
Come around and tidy up
Your place mother?
I’m sorry mother
I’m sorry mother
