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When the night shows
The signals grow on radios
All the strange things
They come and go, as early warnings
Stranded starfish have no place to hide
Still waiting for the swollen Easter tide
There's no point in direction we cannot
Even choose a side.
I took the old track
The hollow shoulder, across the waters
On the tall cliffs
They were getting older, sons and daughters
The jaded underworld was riding high
Waves of steel hurled metal at the sky
And as the nail sunk in the cloud, the rain
Was warm and soaked the crowd.
Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
In any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.
When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You're a thousand minds, within a flash
Don't be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there's only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they'll
Use up what we used to be.
Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
In any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.
The signals grow on radios
All the strange things
They come and go, as early warnings
Stranded starfish have no place to hide
Still waiting for the swollen Easter tide
There's no point in direction we cannot
Even choose a side.
I took the old track
The hollow shoulder, across the waters
On the tall cliffs
They were getting older, sons and daughters
The jaded underworld was riding high
Waves of steel hurled metal at the sky
And as the nail sunk in the cloud, the rain
Was warm and soaked the crowd.
Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
In any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.
When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You're a thousand minds, within a flash
Don't be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there's only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they'll
Use up what we used to be.
Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
In any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.
Lyrics submitted by txsnowbunny
Track duration: 05:39
"Here Comes The Flood" as written by Peter / Gabriel
Lyrics © EMI Music Publishing
Lyrics powered by LyricFind
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At nightfall, radio signals become clearer and reach further ('signals grow'). Shortwave radio signals, which are analogue and have intercontinental reach, are always liable to 'come and go' in a regular fade-and-return cycle. This waveband carried (still does, for all I know) English service versions of Radio Moscow, Voice of America and some other countries' foreign propaganda stations. And the news these are broadcasting isn't good - it contains harbingers ('early warnings') from distant lands of the coming destruction. These are all the more frightening through being only half-heard through the 'come and go' of the signal. I was a lad when this song was written in the mid-70s, and the Cold War was so pervasive then that many of us doubted we'd make it to adulthood. (Though personally, I'm still waiting for that to happen.)
The physical setting for the song now becomes apparent as a place where land and a restless ocean meet ('starfish', 'tide,' 'tall cliffs'). The starfish have been 'stranded' by something that sounds like a tsunami or earthquake, but overall the song makes clear has mankind is its cause. The 'swollen Easter tide' the starfish await is not only the high spring tide following the low which has stranded them, but also a tide of the dead (religious imagery, from the Easter crucifixion of Jesus).
The wordplay of 'There's no point in direction' links in with 'You cannot even choose a side' - the tumult will engulf us all, no matter which way we turn. There is no escaping this.
The singer decides to take to the sea by boat ('the hollow shoulder'), echoing the way Noah survived the first flood. 'The old track' I think refers to the preference of mesolithic and neolithic people in Britain to travel by sea and river rather than make the relatively difficult journeys by land; or perhaps it refers to Noah's strategy, which worked far back in the past. He sees children massed on the clifftops and just waiting there ('getting older'), having nowhere further to run. What's left for them? To hurl themselves off? Evil is triumphing effortlessly ('jaded underworld') over mankind. 'Waves of steel hurled metal at the sky' sounds like a nuclear submarine (that quintessence of the Cold War) launching a missile ('nail'), and the crowd of children suffering the resultant radioactive fallout.
Now we reach the chorus, which again uses the religious imagery of 'Lord' and the apocalyptic 'flood'. Only Noah's immediate family, out of all the earth, survived the first flood, and the odds are against us surviving this one ('say goodbye to flesh and blood'). If anyone does, it will be those prepared to let go of what they owned ('their island' - everything that formerly kept them safe and secure, above the danger level) in order to survive. It may even refer to us Britons having to give up our country, island nation that we are, to endure. The chorus ends (using further wet/dry imagery) by warning those of us who are enjoying life that our time is running out.
The last verse tells how nightmarish this apocalypse will be, how we'll be defenceless ('have no walls') against it. In the 'flash'/'thunder crash' of the nuclear explosions, we'll panic, seeking a thousand ways of escape ('you're a thousand minds'). At such a time we mustn't be afraid to communicate our emotions - being leaderless, we only have each other ('the actor's gone, there's only you and me') and must now be open and honest about how we feel, to see how we can best work together to try to make it through this. If we lose all hope of survival ('break before the dawn'), everything we were will be used to further the conflict.
Having said that, an alternative interpretation of this verse would be more in line with Mr Gabriel's explanation : all mental barriers ('walls') come down, and other people's minds enter ours like a thundercrash. We're no longer able to fabricate impressions of ourselves in others' perceptions ('the actor's gone'), but are seen for who we truly are, and see others with equal clarity ('there's only you and me'). And those of us who can't stand being known in the full light of this honesty ('if we break before the dawn') will shrivel away to nothing; which will further the common good.
And the song ends on the chorus, and indeed on the downbeat warning of, 'Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.'
The song seems to me to be a powerful but bleak vision of a man-made calamity, with the only hope being that those few who survive will be better people, selfless, honest, cooperative and emotionally open.
i'm pretty sure it is "the actor's gone"
the mental flood quotes are correct.
i still get a sense of Atlantis with it.
The last song of Gabriel's first album shares with the first song of the second ("On the Air") an inspiration in radio waves. The changes in strength of radio signals at night are due to a change in the Heaviside and Appleton layers in the ionosphere. Ionosphere cf noosphere, one a discovery of physics, the other metaphysics?
Unlike the poster above, I always heard it as "Lord". Gabriel obviously had a fascination in the 1970s with Western mythologies including Christianity, although he doesn't really return to his own fantastic imaginings until "Ovo". You can interpret "Lord" as a simple interjection like "Wow", or you could see it as supporting an interpretation of the song as about the "rapture" where people give up "flesh and blood". I believe the German version "Jetzt kommt die Flut" omits any equivalent of "Lord" but does use "last days". "Easter tide" I assume is a pun on "spring tide" (the highest tide, when the moon, earth and sun are aligned) but also Eastertide being a period in the Christian calendar.
The scenario reminds me of Arthur C Clarke's _Childhood's End_ (again using some Christian imagery, although Clarke was not a Christian), where the Earth is taken into care by the "Overlords" who serve the "Overmind", and where there is a telepathic joining between individuals that is likened to the connection that exists between apparently separate islands under the sea. The commentary on this site about "Watcher of the Skies" (on the Genesis album _Foxtrot_) also mentions Clarke and that novel, and Clarke was a radio engineer.
The other obvious "island" resonance is John Donne's "Meditation 17" (1623): "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
I heard it as "The *act* is gone, there's only you or me", which is the image of dramatic masks being removed or possibly "The actor's gone, there's only you and me" as in loss of a role.
In 2004, John Cale (of Velvet Underground) chose it as one of his "Desert Island Discs" and they played the "Shaking the Tree" version (I think): "It just got really interesting to me to figure out how this song was written. I think maybe the piano's done first, then the vocals? The link between the two is really tenuous, it's an amorphous sort of mood that you're in, but it's very beautiful, and very calming."
This would be my choice song for topics of Noetics and Transhumanism, a weary post-apocalyptic tune to slow the massive onslaught of merging connected computing with humanity, of skewering private consciousness for immediate interconnection.
The HCTF scenario is within a generation, and decisions today influence the framework and structures of tomorrow's completely connected crash.
"I was referring to a mental flood, actually. You know, a release, a wash over the mind, not necessarily the land. A downhill course which leads to a disaster - an opening up, a telepathic society where people can read each others' minds. Of course, in such a situation there'd be no real change for people who have been honest and open with whatever's in their minds, but those who have been rather two-faced and who have kept their thoughts hidden would find it very difficult."
Very similar to what DexX found in the Armando Gallo publication. For those who love the lyrical genious of PG you should check out a band from Manchester, England called Elbow. You can thank me later :-)
"The act is gone there's only you and me."
the act being the flood, the devastation, leaving only we two alive. at least that's what i've always thought, the million times i've listened to the song and that line specifically, it being my favorite. it absolutely slays me.
The second nit is VERY minor, but he clear enunciates "We will" not "We'll". The line "We will say goodbye to flesh and blood" is very important, as it depicts the casting aside of the self within The Flood -- either in destruction or in a giving in to the Collective Mind. "We'll" diminishes the definitiveness of the statement.
Lastly it's an important element that Gabriel's concept is that this wave is a sort of "accident". No purpose is behind this event. It happens, in his imagining, as a kind of natural disaster. Mental/psychic waves given clarity and strength by the coming of night build together into The Wave by happenstance. But once started, it can't be stopped. There are "early warnings" that it is coming, but once it starts individual minds either become part of it or are consumed by it. I love the "starfish" line, as it eludes to this as a possible "evolutionary" moment for mankind. And the glimpse at the lowly life-form of the starfish is perhaps presented as a metaphor for human beings as we know them before The Flood. The starfish is to us before The Flood as we are to what we evolve into after it -- the Collective Mind we then become.
Amazing song, in my humble opinion. And to the earlier poster's point, the definitive version is either the one on Fripp's "Exposure" or the version on Gabriel's "Hits" compilation disks.