Lyrics The Museum of Fog - The Clientele

The Museum of Fog

One Friday night, in late summer, I was walking the old canal;
cars passed, open windows blaring hits by Madonna.
Buddleias
overhung the road.
I left the towpath as the light began to fail and found myself in a
pub car park.
From its battered sign, I recognised the Fox and
Hounds: I’d last visited two decades ago, before I’d left the
town for good, a 16-year-old slumped over an illegal rum and
coke.
A policeman had been striding towards the door and the
landlady bundled me and my friends out of a window in the
gents toilets, from which we nimbly landed on the canal
towpath, and melted into the night, laughing.
Through the gate and past the bourn
Meadowsweet and thick blackthorn
There were birds high on the trail
When I saw your face
Inside, nothing had changed.
The jukebox still boasted a 45 by
Twinkle, thirty years after it had dropped out of the charts.
Mock
Tudor windows still faced the road and oak beams above
blackened in a fug of smoke.
No one was drinking there.
A crowd didn’t begin to gather until 9. Kids, not cool exactly,
but somehow… leonine.
I guessed from the posters on the
walls they’d come to see a band, and soon they were filing
past me, paying an entrance fee to a man in stonewashed
denim and disappearing into a back room.
The idea of a night
drinking alone was unpleasant to me.
The pub was now empty.
I had nothing to lose, and I picked up my beer, paid my money
and followed them in.
Very early once in May
Voices outside called my name
There were green leaves in your hair
When I kissed your lips
The room was cramped and dark, and during a momentary
hush, a singer on the stage was introduced as The Phantom.
He was wearing the kind of plastic mask sold in art shops, and
a superhero’s cape.
To a round of applause, several other
musicians formed a circle, amps turned in on each other like
wagons on a prairie.
I looked around me: the crowd was bathed
in the red glow of the stage lights.
For a moment, the buzz of
amps filled the expectant quiet.
Then, without a count-in, the
band began to play.
The bell, the cup, the gown
The falling tower falls down
Almost immediately, I froze.
The sound their instruments made
was almost-human: my beer glass slithered through my fingers
as I recognised it as my own 16-year-old laughter, escaping
through a toilet window, retreating from a policeman, dragged
back through the long track of years which had passed, and re-
presented, re-lived in front of the audience.
In its disembodied
state, it was one of the most purely beautiful things I have ever
heard—it briefly brought the past back to life, old hopes and
innocence burst into sudden flower.
I was sweating, shaking
in the dark room, tears welling in my eyes.
But within seconds
the laughter died and the hair on my arms stood up—I had the
physical sensation of shapes evaporating away into the night
outside.
Slowly, the music took on a harsher, more abstract tenor, and in
it I heard the faint seashore noises of the motorway, building into
a long drone which slowly became overwhelming, roaring like a
jet engine.
To me, at that moment, it seemed to express our
years of living with that motorway sound, years of it
underscoring every day and night, every experience we’d lived
through, cleansing it from our bodies and minds in a deafening
catharsis.
Hollow boned, you’ll waste away
Searching through the forest glades
For the green leaves in the hair
And the lips that kiss
I was shaking as the band rounded their set out with a wash of
bells or wind chimes.
As they left the stage to scattered applause,
it occurred to me that the Phantom had not sung a note.
He was pushing through the crowd towards the exit, hemmed
in by acolytes.
I tried to get near him but I couldn’t.
Dazzled by
the sudden bright light in the room, my certainty drifted away;
had the sounds I’d heard been exactly what I’d thought they
were?
I was in a difficult, neurotic state and perhaps there were
memories welling up that I couldn’t control.
I felt suddenly
depressed and tired, disgusted with my own numbness.
Hollow boned, you’ll waste away
Searching through the forest glades
For the green leaves in the hair
And the lips that kiss
Kids were leaving, ignitions starting up outside;
the Phantom
had joined a carload, rolling on up the road towards the town
and its only nightclub.
The pub was closing down.
I stood in the
night and I wondered what had been taken from me.