instant karma: completely gone fishing

liner notes: marty

"A song about Columbus riding his bike to the outer rim of Suburbia."

If there's one thing, I learned in school, it's that the Earth is round, an endless ball wherever you go, but they were wrong, because I'm standing on the edge and I'm looking down over the rim all the way down. The world is all I've got, that's not a lot, and the sky doesn't change hue, but at least it's blue, so wonderfully blue ... Down on my street I can ride forever to other parts of town, an endless round, wherever I go it looks the same, and sometimes I feel the urge to go and kick in any door and tear it all down. The world is a parking lot, a big green lawn, a shining mall, and the sky is hanging low, but it's aglow, with a thousand lights aglow. And the sun is a gaseous ball, we know it all, it's reachable, and the moon's been trodden on, it's not shining on for anyone ...

--Martin

liner notes: sleeper

'Slightly surrealistic lyrics. I just compared my own feeble body to plants & trees, with wrinkles and scars just growing on me while I'm asleep. As I'm one of these people that need to iron their faces after they've woken up (I'm a real pain in the morning), the thought just came up slightly before any signs of age were really visible. My Dad was amazed that I would write such stuff this early in life ...'

Call me the sleeper, cause I'm hiding from the day. I creep out of the woodwork, just at night so I can fake. I'm the sleeper. Dreamwrinkles grow my face, each one a different taste. Who cares if sadness or even gladness? I'm the sleeper and I dream. I love what they do to me, they clean. Dreamwrinkles grow on me, each one's a different tree. My heart is ploughing the seeds my heart is sowing ...

--Gordon

liner notes: 2 o clockwise

"One of the IK Glamrock-Classics with lots of unexpected chords in it - pre-destined for the reaction: 'Sounds great, but we'd like to do a single-cut of that!' (also known as "castrating the artist's dignity"). This song is a good example of how I.K.-songs used to work at that time. It had that commercial chorus in it which made up for the anarchist-"we don't give a shit"- parts that the record-company especially hated."

Couldn't sleep at night, I've been crying all day. Couldn't eat a thing, had to throw up again. Couldn't be on my own, had to talk to a human trashcan. Couldn't walk in the crowd, it's not how many there are, but how long it takes to get through them. My fun begins on the fireplace of my last crisis, I dance and say here's to the times where you break up and feel intensively. I lay a tree trunk over the river, sit on it, let time go by, keep cool, keep cool water. Close my eyes in anger, open them in joy, don't you know that it's hip to be in a bad mood? Well I don't think so ... My fun begins on the fireplace ...

--Tom

liner notes: sorry, wrong planet

'I wrote and recorded the demo of this song after a good night out and rather too many toxic fluids. So there I was, 4 AM, totally drunk with this brilliant idea in my head, no microphone, just a metronome, an electric guitar, my 4-track tapemachine and headphones. Because I was living in a student home with paper-thin walls and hundreds of direct neighbours at the time I had to be all quiet as well. OK, I could use the headphones as a mic, just plug it in and record the metronome at 120 beats per minute. What do you do when you've got no guitar amp or fuzz and you still want a bit of distortion? You just use the transistor line gain on the 4-track and make due with the rather edgy outcome. Singing? All quiet? and just one set of headphones? I put the headphones on, left side on my mouth, right side on the back of my head, watched the VU-Meter of the metronome on the 4 track, counted my way through the song and whispered the lyrics. All done, I repulsed the phones to the appropriate input, noticed the recording level was near zilch, turned the volume to max and printed it to tape. You can imagine that this technique increased the overall noise level to unbelievable heights. And we even managed to recreate all this in a proper studio for the opener on `Small Mother'.'

Oh, I'm sorry this is the wrong planet that I put you down on. Though the clocks are ticking forward, time stands still for all but one. They all look like humans, yet nobody's sure the are. More than one. Beam us up, spare us the pain, all is hot, too hot to care for. Taken time, we feel the need to blank our minds and start to read. Books surpassed our deafened eyes and all that turns our heads are flies. Are flies ...

--Gordon