Songs: Another Man's Laundry (hanging on your line)

notes / gigs / releases

When i called around this morning you weren't home
When i telephoned this evening some man picked up the phone
We pledged our love as sun set on the old Vic Berry's bridge
But it turns out you're a lying two-faced double crossing bitch

'Cos there's another man's laundry on your line
Boxers in your basket, and none of them are mine
Your freezer's full of meat, which is something you don't eat
There's another man's laundry hanging on your line

Well I saw his car parked in your parking space
And I looked up at the window and saw your pretty face
Through tears i realised that our love had been ignored
As you ironed out his Levi's on that cheating ironing board

'Cos there's another man's laundry on your line
Boxers in your basket, and none of them are mine
Your freezer's full of meat, which is something you don't eat
There's another man's laundry hanging on your line

Go and fetch the sheriff, i won't put up a fight
Because i did an evil thing when i saw you there last night
I crept into your backyard, saw my rival sipping wine
So i strangled him right there and then with that good old washing line

'Cos There's another man's laundry on your line
Boxers in your basket, and none of them are mine
Your freezer's full of meat, which is something you don't eat
There's another man's laundry hanging on your line

Well, tonight you'll hear the jangling of my spurs
As i am dangling from that gibbet yonder on the square of fifth and nine
And my ghost, so they say, will appear there every day
Yes i'll be there, like that laundry hanging on your line

'Cos there's another man's laundry on your line
Boxers in your basket, and none of them are mine
Your freezer's full of meat, which is something you don't eat
There's another man's laundry hanging from your line

Published by Wipe Out Music Publishing

Ah yes, as I say, I'd recently started writing DOCUMENTARY SONGS that were utterly true to life and spoke directly from MY SOUL.

Er... and also this one. At the same time as I was embarking on my SOLO CAREER I was still very occasionally playing in The Council. This had originally been the band me and Neil formed after Voon as a way of, to be honest, getting rid of everybody else in the band and starting again with just the two of us. We started off by recording a tape called "Your Haircut" (We thought people might go into shops and say "Do you have 'Your Haircut' by The Council?" you see, with HILARITY ensuing, but as it never actually GOT into any shops the HILARITY was pretty much restricted to me and Neil) which was just guitar, bass, and some VERY ANGRY shouting. OH MY but I was a bitter angry young man at that point - we were ANNOYED, largely, about Girls Not Talking To Us, but didn't realise that SHOUTING ANGRILY about it was not likely to help. Somehow we managed to persuade Tim From Prolapse to join us after we did one FANTASTIC gig between Christmas and New Year supporting them. It was SUCH a good gig - I distinctly remember making the whole room LAUGH just by raising an eyebrow, feeling GUILTY about being SO GOOD (and seeing Geordie Mick looking miserable at the idea of having to FOLLOW us!), having someone say "I hate you - all the women here want to sleep with you and all the men here want to BE you" (which was MANIFESTLY untrue, but still) and even having to go ON afterwards to The Fan Club, SPECIFICALLY to give everyone else who wanted to say we were GRATE the chance to say so to our faces. Oh yes, it was a BRILLIANT gig - mystifyingly so, actually, as usually we were pretty rubbish. The first gig we did with Tim, in fact, was APPALLING, we didn't know the songs, and were SO DRUNK that Tim fell off his drum stool.

Anyway, this version of The Council pottered along, and after a while we went into Bedrock Studio in Leicester and recorded another tape, "Parks & Gardens Department". Listening to it now is a bit weird - the SOUND of it is quite good, and there's some nice BITS, but mostly it's MORE extreme ANGER about things we shouldn't really be quite so ANGRY about, and playing VERY FAST. Also there's a VERY VERY bitter song called "Your Girlfriend's Friend" which, at the time, I thought was LOVELY, but actually features NASTY singing and NASTY sentiment. The only NICE thing on it is the last song, "Mind The Death", which we made up in the studio and which has an ACE RANT by Neil in it - it sounds, basically, like VOON, and is much the better for it.

I'm getting to the point, honest.

Shortly after this Prolapse started doing PROPERLY better, Tim didn't have much time for other activities, and The Council slowly petered out. HOWEVER it did occasionally rise again, the FINAL time ( I think ) being when Tim got us a gig supporting The Yummy Fur at the Physio & Firkin. For some reason LOST to me now we decided that we'd do the gig dressed as COWBOYS. Why did we decide THAT, I wonder? Decide it we DID though, so I went out and bought some plastic cowboy hats, me and Neil both wrote a couple of new songs, and we learned them up in our one and only pre-gig practice, also COUNTRIFYING a couple of our existing numbers.

It's bothering me now, why on earth did we decide to do that? Anyway, I wrote a song called something like "Let me be your cowboy, you can be my squaw", and then spent a LOT of time writing THIS song. I was EXTREMELY pleased with this one, and afterwards thought that it was MUCH too good a song to let disappear into the ETHER after only one outing, so worked it out into the version you can hear here. We also tried doing it with The Validators once, as Tim already knew how it went, and I can still hear him BANGING the snare drum on the "so I strangled him" bit, and him TERRIFYINGLY jangling the cymbals on the bit about spurs jangling.

Oh yeah, and I'm still not sure where the square of fifth and nine is (it's 84.64 in MATH, but I don't know that that helps), although I think it just sounded right at the time. I still like the idea of part of the story happening on Upperton Road bridge in Leicester, from which you used to be able to look over Vic Berry's scrap yard, and I can picture the back garden where the STRANGLING takes place, so it is a BIT true to life. But not very.

Right! Back to the misery!