STREETS OF SORROW/
BIRMINGHAM SIX
Oh farewell you streets of sorrow
And farewell you streets of pain
I'll not return to feel more sorrow
Nor to see more young men slain
Through the last six years I've lived through terror
And in the darkened streets the pain
Oh how I long to find some solace
In my mind I curse the strain
So farewell you streets of sorrow
And farewell you streets of pain
No I'll not return to feel more sorrow
Nor to see more young men slain
There were six men in Birmingham
In Guildford there's four
That were picked up and tortured
And framed by the law
And the filth got promotion
But they're still doing time
For being Irish in the wrong place
And at the wrong time
In Ireland they'll put you away in the maze
In England they'll keep you for seven long days
God help you if ever you're caught on these shores
The coppers need someone
And they walk through that door
You'll be counting years
First five, then ten
Growing old in a lonely hell
Round the yard and the stinking cell
From wall to wall, and back again
A curse on the judges, the coppers and screws
Who tortured the innocent, wrongly accused
For the price of promotion
And justice to sell
May the judged by their judges when they rot down in hell
May the whores of the empire lie awake in their beds
And sweat as they count out the sins on their heads
While over in Ireland eight more men lie dead
Kicked down and shot in the back of the head
copyright 1988 Terry Woods & Shane MacGowan
Note: The liner notes read "In
England they'll keep you for several long days," but it's always sounded
to me like what is said is "seven long days." My suspicions were
confirmed when Toby Everett wrote
to me with:
When I was looking at the lyrics on your page I noticed that
you used the sequence "In England they'll keep you for several long
days." It's the same in the CD liner, but I think the CD liner gets
it wrong. It sounds to me more like "In England they'll keep you for
seven long days." What is more, as I recall, the provisions of the
Prevention of Terrorism Act held that they could keep one under lock and
key without charge or writ of habeus corpus for seven days. I found the
following chunk of text whilst poking around that seems to support this:
(4) Subject to subsection (5) below, a person arrested under this
section shall not be detained in right of the arrest for more than forty-eight
hours after his arrest.
(5) The Secretary of State may, in any particular case, extend the period
of forty-eight hours mentioned in subsection (4) above by a period or periods
specified by him, but any such further period or periods shall not exceed
five days in all and if an application for such an extension is made the
person detained shall as soon as practicable be given written notice of
that fact and of the time when the application was made.
So, what do you think? Is it conceivable that the liner lyrics are wrong?
--Toby Everett
If you have a different take on this lyric, let me
and Toby know.
Your intrepid maintainer is DzM.
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