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)