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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Little Dish Records no. LiDiCD 004

    Strictly limited edition of 1000 copies of 12-track CD. Songs by Leon Rosselson performed by Nancy Kerr, includes sleeve notes in accompanying digipak and booklet with photography by James Fagan and illustration/design by Lizzy Doe.

    Includes unlimited streaming of The Poor Shall Wear the Crown: Songs by Leon Rosselson via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 10 days
    edition of 1000 
    Purchasable with gift card

      £12 GBP or more 

     

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      £1 GBP  or more

     

  • Buy the Full Digital Album

about

This starkly apposite piece, written after the Aberfan disaster, has been reinterpreted by many great performers, but given late-capitalism’s ongoing rampages I felt I had to brave it anyway. I love the way that, in the chorus, the narrative voice stays on one note, while the accompaniment flies upwards, like a dream.

lyrics

If the sons of company directors,
And judges' private daughters,
Had to go to school in a slum school,
Dumped by some joker in a damp back alley,
Had to herd into classrooms cramped with worry,
With a view onto slagheaps and stagnant pools,
Had to file through corridors grey with age,
And play in a crackpot concrete cage.

Chorus (repeated after each verse):
Buttons would be pressed,
Rules would be broken.
Strings would be pulled
And magic words spoken.
Invisible fingers would mould
Palaces of gold.

If prime ministers and advertising executives,
Royal personages and bank managers' wives
Had to live out their lives in dank rooms,
Blinded by smoke and the foul air of sewers.
Rot on the walls and rats in the cellars,
In rows of dumb houses like mouldering tombs.
Had to bring up their children and watch them grow
In a wasteland of dead streets where nothing will grow.

I'm not suggesting any kind of a plot,
Everyone knows there's not,
But you unborn millions might like to be warned
That if you don't want to be buried alive by slagheaps,
Pit-falls and damp walls and rat-traps and dead streets,
Arrange to be democratically born
The son of a company director
Or a judge's fine and private daughter.

credits

from The Poor Shall Wear the Crown: Songs by Leon Rosselson, released December 26, 2021
Nancy Kerr: vocals and guitar

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Nancy Kerr image

Nancy Kerr Sheffield, UK

Folk Singer of the Year BBC Folk Awards 2015

"Outstanding chamber folk" (The Guardian) "Folk's Poet Laureate" (FRUK) "One of the UK’s foremost composers of modern folk and social commentary songs” (Royal Shakespeare Company).

Photo credits: James Fagan, Elly Lucas
Album design: Lizzy Doe ... more

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