INTERNATIONAL DOOMSDAY ALERT!
Another interruption, readers – I’ve just heard a terrible warning!
“Mother Earth she’s on overload
One more war and she might explode”
Explode?! That’s bad news! We’d better disarm right now and – what? What’s that you say? That’s not a prediction at all? It’s just the lyrics of “House Of Love” by East 17? And since they were written we’ve had several wars and no planetary-sized explosions? Oh. Well, I knew that. Obviously.
East 17 though seemed very convinced that the world was actually on the verge of blowing up in 1992. “We’ve gotta save the planet before she explodes…gotta let her know – boom boom – before she blows.”. They had evidence, too – “Too many bombs in the world it’s like a living mine”. Better hope nobody steps on it, then. These warnings were a little florid but much stranger was their solution – building “The House Of Love”.
For a while I was puzzled by this command. The House Of Love had taken a long time to split up but thankfully the message had finally got through to Guy Chadwick and the lads. One concertgoer too many had turned fearfully away crying, “Mummy! The monster scares me!” and the band had called it a day. During their long career though they had shown much evidence of being able to slow down Byrds songs and mope over the top of them but little proof of any world-saving ability. The original script of The Day After Tomorrow, where a particularly long Terry Bickers solo bludgeons the US Government into accepting the Kyoto agreement, had been roundly rejected.
Then it struck me – in his garbled fashion Tony Mortimer was making a plea for recycling! If you got the huge numbers of unsold copies of Never and The Beatles And The Stones and shipped them to the developing world, you could indeed build affordable housing for all and they would live in peace! What a visionary!
Of course it’s just possible that Tony Mortimer thought that world peace would be achieved by everybody going to a big shed and getting monged on pills. You could make a case for that being the message of his hit song.
Didn’t work though, did it?