Gareth Liddiard - Strange Tourist lyrics

It was all falling down and a long way from cheap So tell me why did we live where we lived? Above the old fish shop where they served up slop And all the alley cats talked in their sleep I spent a year there with B After I quit the Mitsubishi Dragged my mattress up some stairs by the sea Then watched the old van rust in the gusts of the coast Ending its knightly expeditions for beer B went psychotic in the navy and he wouldn't mend Something about a sunk junk and speed Well he couldn't shake the illness or endure the cure And there was no point switching treatments in the Timor Sea I have never known someone who needed to talk so much Or even fool himself disguising a guess I just steered his bullsh** through its next diversion Never bothering with reality checks Bowerbird, you'd turn a birdbath black What the hell could be the matter with you? Where did you come from and why'd you go collecting Anything that turns the colour blue? B took his refuge in the open where it stings You think you'd seen him but he's gone in a blink Once those Stilnox hit their target don't trust nothing No one And don't go believing anything that you think He'd say, "I'm half way through But I don't know what I'm doing I ain't feeling much of nothing at all But it's my first time too, if that's a valid excuse I'm going to wait here for the engines to stall I've seen the tracks of some giant, the smoke of some fire Fuse like hot sands in a bottleneck Does all of beauty lie in being dead and gone Or is all history made of chickens and their unhatched eggs I've seen the spectre of a frigate on a dry rock face A stone axe held together with an old bootlace Anything betraying the drift of dead headway You can shake it but it won't let go All that so men can live like girls to keep their might pert Digging music made by millionaires for car adverts Save the whales, invade Iraq and have a hamburger I can't distinguish between the nightmare and the joke I was in Tokyo once without any cash Koda Kumi sang a coda pink as sarin gas I took a trip to Nagasaki in a rented Mitsubishi Then went camping in the Jukai under Mount Fuji" Bowerbird, you'd turn a birdbath black What the hell could be the matter with you? Where did you come from and why'd you go collecting Anything that turns the colour blue? But when his pension got suspended Well that spelled the end And I joined his life of leisure in flight It's too hard to row a boat using a periscope Sometimes you gotta do wrong to do right He got in trouble years back, I haven't seen him since In a men's room in a night club in Madrid He sold some dexedrine or something to a plain clothes D Then raised a stink so bad they ended up deporting him Then last I heard he was as free as a bird or into Scientology Or into Heaven's Gate or Sharon Tate Or in the Legionnaires Or gone to Georgia with the Mujahideen And someone else was walking eggshells in his birdcage Someone else shared his unending lease on hamstrung rage He was someone else's problem, and that made me glad They can indulge him 'till he's ironclad Bowerbird, you'd turn a birdbath black What the hell could be the matter with you? Where did you come from and why'd you go collecting Anything that turns the colour blue? I wound up working in a hospital Renting TV's to the bored and the blind Seems the DSS got sick of my BS And had my unemployment privatised They made a date with me, some agency And I went down there like a fool in love They made a few phone calls, found a real cure-all Like I wasn't miserable enough I was working night shift when he got there The first time I'd seen a coma on the ward The sister said he won't be needing TV now Probably won't be needing nothing at all He was in Tokyo for a while until he stabilised They flew him back here and the story unfolded They found him frozen in a hollow in Aokigahara forest Where those harakiri weirdoes go He died a little later, and was wheeled away I'd blame his morbid fascination for it all And his doubtless, groundless faith In his outdoorsmanship He didn't k** himself, he didn't have the balls Hope dies last in a hospital But has a habit of doing it next to you While you sh** kick around with your eyes to the ground Like a bowerbird appropriating anything The colour blue