LyricMeaning

Strange Tourist
Gareth Liddiard

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 bullshit through the 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 specter 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 see 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 once until he stabilised
They flew him back here and the story unfolded
They found him frozen in a hollow in Aokigahara forest
Where those harrakiri weirdos 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 kill 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 shit kick around with your eyes to the ground
Like a bowerbird appropriating anything
The colour blue.


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