thomas dolby: "love is a loaded pistol"

I've been playing TED for nearly a decade, and I've very rarely played any new songs of my own. And that was largely because there weren't any.

(Laughter)

So I've been busy with a couple of projects, and one of them was this: The Nutmeg. A 1930s ship's lifeboat, which I've been restoring in the garden of my beach house in England. And, so now, when the polar ice caps melt, my recording studio will rise up like an ark, and I'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel. During the day, the Nutmeg collects energy from solar panels on the roof of the wheelhouse, and from a 450 watt turbine up the mast. So that when it gets dark, I've got plenty of power. And I can light up the Nutmeg like a beacon. And so I go in there until the early hours of the morning, and I work on new songs. I'd like to play to you guys, if you're willing to be the first audience to hear it.

(Applause)

It's about Billie Holiday. And it appears that, some night in 1947 she left her physical space and was missing all night, until she reappeared in the morning. But I know where she was. She was with me on my lifeboat. And she was hot.

(Music)

Billie crept softly

into my waking arms

warm like a sip of sour mash

Strange fruit for

a sweet hunk of trash

Panic at the stage door

of Carnegie Hall

"Famous Jazz Singer Gone AWOL"

Must have left the building

body and soul

On a creaky

piano stool tonight

as the moon is my

only witness

She was breathing

in my ear

"This time it's love"

But love is a loaded pistol

By daybreak she's gone

Over the frozen river, home

Me and Johnny Walker

See in the new age

alone

Stay with me

again tonight

Billie, time,

time is a wily trickster

Still an echo

in my heart says,

"This time it's love"

(Applause)