From picket lines to picket fences
Those leaden skies are paved with gold
Let fortune chime on godforsaken
Places still untold
All spirits rise like misty mornings
All contracts die, all sellers lose
All frontiers lie on streets you’re born in
Make up your own news
It came from Doncaster
It came from Cumbernauld
The bedsits and the bistro bars of Basingstoke
Right here in Runcorn
Right here in Scunthorpe
Morecambe, Mansfield, Mablethorpe
Let’s start a fire where nothing prospered
Lift up the stones and let it all crawl out
Lay down the bones of infrastructure
Write your own instruction for
The big-times redistributed
Satellites without gravity
What’s left behind was narcoleptic, anyway
Watch them flee the industry
And it came from Workington
It came from Kirkcaldy
The prefabs and the function rooms of Pontefract
Right here in Redcar
Right here in Fishguard
Worksop, Widnes, all things west of Lowestoft.
From all the places that you’ve heard about
Beyond the slip roads, country lanes,
With willing faces always staring back
From shattered bus stops in the rain
It matters not if they don’t hear about
It matters not if there is fame
It matters not if there’s no magic thread
Through places, footnotes
And thumb prints on your panes
From here to the gates of Hasty Lane
Re-draft the manuscript, re-write the nondescript,
Re-wire the network and emancipate the ill-equipped.
Forgotten overspills, under the cotton mills
And the rainbow leans over Milton Keynes’ new scenesters...
