WHITE LIES

A song for a friend who said, "Write a song about an English lie." He's mixed-race, so he has a perspective from both sides of the multicultural track. I scribbled out a quickie on the way back from Newark to Harrogate, a thirty-minute thrash. I based it on Big Frank King, a boxing champion from the West Indies whom I worked alongside, painting cars when I was a teenager ; he'd come across on the Windrush. leaving behind the beautiful Barbadian blue skies to work driving a bus in Birmingham, all because of English white lies. This little song all started with me telling my friend that I'd been in Peterborough train station, surrounded by rain-soaked refugees who smelled of bread and cheese, just like I once had when I was living on the streets in France. Cheese was the cheapest thing to live on.