Once (Roy Harper album)
| Once | ||||
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| Studio album by Roy Harper | ||||
| Released | May 1990 | |||
| Recorded | Harper's home in Lincolnshire | |||
| Genre | rock | |||
| Length | 41:38 | |||
| Label | IRS Records, Awareness Records | |||
| Producer | Roy Harper | |||
| Roy Harper chronology | ||||
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| Allmusic |   |
Once is the sixteenth studio album by English rock/folk singer-songwriter Roy Harper, released in 1990.
David Gilmour, Kate Bush, Nick Harper and Nigel Mazlyn Jones appear on the album, with both Gilmour and Bush on the title track.
The track "The Black Cloud of Islam" is a despairing castigation of radical Islam.
I'm sick to the teeth of the news on the screen
Of hisbollah scum and jihad the obscene
Whose men plant the bombs and then live feeling free
To watch women and children be killed on T. V.
Which satan delivers a child a death curse
In the name of a worn out collection of verse
I've not read the book so I cannot recite
But I'd bet Salman Rushdie is just about right
Underneath the black cloud of islam.
The song provoked some criticism, to which Harper responded, in 2006, when he wrote: "I let my guard slip. I knew that I’d let it slip. I wanted it to slip. I was absolutely sick of being politically correct. I am not politically correct, I never have been..". His stated reason for penning the song was his "feelings of despair" about his "worst dreams coming true" about religion gaining ground. Religion, he stated on his personal blog, was something he regarded with the "deepest possible suspicion" and now, to his horror, he could see it "about to storm the world" and "take over whole swathes of humanity"; a thought that he detested and made him "want to die on the spot". In a later interview with The Daily Telegraph, the matter of this song was raised. Harper asserted that he wrote the song "as a liberal, not as a racist" and was inspired to do so by the 1988 Lockerbie Bombing.
The opening verse of "Berliners" is the 4th stanza of Laurence Binyon's "Ode of Remembrance", and is preceding by a recording of a Remembrance Day ceremony where the same stanza was recited. The song also uses a BBC news broadcast describing the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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Wikipedia