Lyrics (Something About) Ysabel's Dance - Peter Hammill

(Something About) Ysabel's Dance

In the new hotel, on Fiesta Night, the staff are bored;
Donna Ysabel dances zombie-like, the guests applaud…
The color is local, the tourists are tanned
The natives are restless and everything’s second-hand
Places disappear, but the names endure as alibis;
Memory’s hazy here, no-one's really sure of how time flies…
Well drunk, the bass player cries into his beer —
Are Ysabel’s mother or Ysabel dancing here?
After hours all the couriers are in the bar
Round the corner with the drivers in a game of cards…
In bursts Ysabel, her hair let loose, her limbs set free;
On the tabletops she’s dancing to a memory —
Conversation stops and every eye is turned to see…
Something about Ysabel’s dance
It’s a shrinking world, it’s a fun-packed cruise, a museum trip:
Skirt the native girl, check the rabid dog, rejoin the ship
There’s no Charlie Mingus, his Tijuana’s gone…
This smile for the camera is all just a tourist con
But after hours all the couriers and drivers know
Of a cantina where there’s every chance that she might show;
And maybe Ysabel will dance the dance for real again
Her mother’s footsteps, vice and virtue, lust and love and pain
There’s something here the anthropologist dare not explain
Something about Ysabel’s dance…