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Dawn Patrol

from Then, and Then: a memoir by DATSON

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  • Boxed set Limited edition 2 x CD + Book 64pp ISBN:9780975186206 (pbk.)
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    The album comes with a beautifully packaged book of poetry. The words on the page are satisfying enough, unlike most rock lyrics, but benefit from accompaniment. ... Like any collection of poetry, you can dip in and out, but listening to the story unfold is the way to do it. This is definitely not, as they might say in Star Trek, rock & roll as we know it. It will adjust your set. TOBY CRESWELL

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about

Then, and Then is a record of Datson’s peripatetic travels in time and space from adolescence on a farm in Cooroy on the Sunshine Coast to Sydney and then around the world back to Sydney and finally back to Cooroy. It’s an album that starts with teenage dreams of Patti Smith and the symbolist poets and Neil Young and winds up back on the land. As a teenager he’s full of ideas and adventures. By the end of the journey, he’s coming to understand the acceptance of country that his father had. “Homeland Borderland Wasteland” is the most obviously political, while “Pied Plucker of Cooroy” the most whimsical.

lyrics

If I lived alone at the end of a long street
with curtains drawn dusty
and smoke chimneying up my air
glistening pavements in the wet
footfalls

Long night of the suburb
Fire’s break out
but I’m not a starter
A watcher,
a walker a thinker.
by subway or culvert
Loneliness is never clandestine
just outside and lonely
like mail man

Like mailman
No news, no sack,
no shift, no uniform
more carrier pigeon than
Kurtz’s cursed delivery boy

Perhaps though
I’d send myself a letter
Then, received expectant
note from then until now:
Dearest sister,
I’d say, paraphrasing myself
Your family and husband send
their deepest affections
Please find enclosed your application
for migration
How did I then end migrated
like a southern bird
who’s lost all will to go home?

That not one of my generation should taste freedom
freezes the genes and civilisation stagnant
The press depressing
the people insular
the climate forgiving
the economy profligate
the church fitful to sporadic
sport…
now you’ve got them talking!

You didn’t chose me to arrive
and I didn’t expect you to greet me
but tonight behind sleepy eyes
rest assured
that I am out here
patrolling for you

Let me explain it this way;
As I see it
your society is an insurance job
a stand over tactic of understatement
an insider job committed by sociopaths
administered by control freaks who definitely know best
and funded by every one of us
according
to our greed.

credits

from Then, and Then: a memoir, released June 1, 2020
© Geoffrey Datson and Annette Hughes, Produced by Geoffrey Datson, Recorded and mixed at Greenroom Studio Cooroy.

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DATSON Australia

GEOFFREY DATSON is a sound artist, combining spoken word, electronica and instrumentation in his recordings. Many poets recite their work to music, but few are also composers. Datson's work is a synthesis of forms of sonic expression in which the voice and the sound field are interdependent. ... more

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