Peter Hammill - German Overalls lyrics

Mannheim: rainy Saturday with no money nor friend... only Tequila can end the boredom. Try to reach London for a pocket of hope; we're children, we grope in the dark. Hugh spends his last Mark on coffee and cheese... I feel just like a refugee.... Rathaus-keepers and traffic police, middle-aged maids with rotting teeth, industrial magazines and old Sunday Times: reading material/bleeding lines. What are we doing here? Memorial menace, eager for revenge, has begun to bend our minds. Shower-curtain imperative in the presence of acid; now, feeling placid is d**h. I try to hold my breath as the P.A. comes down.... here we all are in Ktown! The Big Wheel never fails to grind around... it drags me up/it d** me down. Seven senses wonder 'Can this be real, Or am I become a performing seal?' Why are we dying here? I walk the streets alone, try to find a sign of love. I've crushed the plaster-bone in the freaky clubs. I have bit the fruit but all I live for is to play and I'm tired of the nights and the days of airports, taxis and motorway showers, groping for a key in the afterhours. David takes to travelling in the van, he knows that we all can understand: we're at the mercy of the Kosmos tour, making a pilgrimage to the German Lourdes... but we're still crippled here. Cathedrals spiral skywards; I think I'm getting vertigo. I think I don't know what is real. One more sudden spotlight; one more madness is over; I must not show a sign of fear. Words echo round my ears, I think I'm going to laugh... think I'll just go and take a bath, guess I'll wash my clothes, don't you know I'll grow to go and make my name, maybe be a servant in the Famegame; stake my sane and rest my life on the line.... Now lay me asunder and rend my mind; at the fall of the curtain let this be my ghost.