Transcribed by Mark Dorset
He's gone, / he's gone. /
She wears sad jeans / torn at the waistband. /
Her pretty face / is stained with tears. /
And in her right hand / she clasps a letter; /
I know this means / that he has gone. /
And in this town / of mis-guided tourists, /
she never thought / she'd fall in love. /
It was a few days / after her birthday, /
The thrill hostess / gave her first kiss. /
He said her skin / smelled just like petals, /
said stupid things / he knew she'd like. /
She said her life / was like a motorway: /
Dull, grey, and long / 'til he came along. /
He's gone, / he's gone. /
I said "How could / he ever leave you? /
You two were good, / you were so right." /
She said "I wish / that he just left me; /
He'd be alive, / alive tonight." /
He's gone, / he's gone. /
He's gone, / he's gone. /
He's gone, / he's gone.
Credits
- Composition:
-
- Vocals:
-
References
The vocal line and some of the lyrical content of this song seem to owe
quite a large debt to Joan Baez's Silver Dagger.
Trivia
Here's the band talking about the track, shamelessly pinched from
Melody Maker:
Bob:
Number Forty-Seven with a bullet. The Americans tried to get us to
change the title to Like A Freeway! Can you believe it? We
said, Autobahn was a hit all around the world, fuck off.
Pete:
Yeah, [it was supposed to be a Shangri-Las style death song.] Or
Ring A Ring O' Roses. Folk songs about death and
destruction.
Bob:
Tiger Bay was supposed to be an album of modern folk songs
done in twentieth century styles like techno and dub. So we wrote most
of it in the Forest Of Dean. We went into the country to get our heads
together. We wanted to do loads of songs about death, so we bought the
local papers to get some real stories, and there was nothing. Then the
week after we moved, they discovered the bodies in Cromwell Road!
Pete:
Little did we know that our friend Fred, who'd lent us his cottage,
was such a bad man.
[Frederick West and his wife killed tenants and stored the corpses
beneath the floorboards. It was big tabloid news in the UK at the
time.]
Versions and sources
- Like A Motorway
- Like A Motorway (alternate version edit)
- Like A Motorway (alternate version)
- Like A Motorway (chekhov warp dub)
- Like A Motorway (chekhov warp mix)
- Like A Motorway (david holmes mix)
- Like A Motorway (skin up, you're already dead)
- Like A Motorway [album version edit]
- Like A Motorway [album version]
- Like A Motorway [edit]
- Like A Motorway [video]
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