City Dweller
Lyrics
Dictum: message of the euro-bore
Random
It's a good life, bowing to a tyrant (2)
Gone
Christian gang chants sweet
Regional
Keep your head down for the moment
(That now suit is now in bucket
It's a good life, Europe)
Avoid the dismantled
All heads stuck in bloody plant pots (3)
All looking at them
Forgetting the endless drive against nature
City dweller
Must we base ourselves again into organic mud?
You're well welcome to it
Get out of my city you mediocre pseud
And take those red-tie bastards
Who put up the olympic flag with you (4)
They walk around leering at young girls in packs
Worse than any yobs (5)
(.....Catalonian)
It's January 20th
Euro-bore: I support media
Keep olympic bidding
City dweller
Backwards
More than you can ever know
Mr. cab driver
What do you want
Mr. cab driver (6)
City dweller
This hillbilly cab driver
He has submerged himself into the psyche of the average
Cab driver
They love me, they knock off 10 to 15 pence
This is wandering
Those casual days are over and dull
dull (7)
Agricultural gangs chant for sweet freedom (8)
Get out of my city
You mediocre pseud
And take those red tie bastards with you
City dweller
They should remember there's nothing worse
Than a half-educated grim red dwarf
City dweller
Cuts up
Cab driver, cab driver
Oh Mr cab driver
(He's up there now, listening to us, I know he is)
Why do you leave a a poxy card? (9)
Oh, Mr. cab driver
What do about it?
Too much to drink
Too many drugs
Too much sex
Too young
Notes
1. This originally appeared on the Behind the Counter single as "Cab Driver." The lyrics of that version are different, but they are hard to make out; at some point it would be good to put them up, so if anyone knows what they are, please contact me.
2. A dictum is an authoritative but not legally binding statement made by a judge or, in common usage, any sort of proclamation; the dictum here is presumably "It's a good life, bowing to a tyrant."
djbawbag points out that there is a Twilight Zone episode called "It's a Good Life," in which the plot does involve bowing to a tyrant, in the form of 6-year-old Anthony Fremont, who has mental powers that make him extemely dangerous. Otherwise, he's about like any other 6-year-old, which means the people of the town have to make sure they don't displease him if they wish to survive.
3. Carl says "Manchester City Council hired people to wear costumes with plant-pots for a head, flowers coming out of the top, and walk around the Market Street/Piccadilly Gardens area." It is not certain why this happened, or if it happened in just this way, but Carl says he saw them himself. As yet we have no corroborating evidence of this.
4. Manchester bid for the 2000 Olympics, and this presumably would have already been going on in 1993 or 1994 when MES was writing this song (at whjch point, I'm told, the 1996 Olympics was already set).
Manchester unsuccessfully bid for the Olympic games in 1992, 1996 and 2000, finally landing a sort of booby prize, the 2002 Commonwealth Games.
5. A "yob," in English slang, is a crass and aggressive young man from a working class background. A yob is somewhat similar to what is now called a "chav," I think, but the former is more likely to be violent, as far as I can make out.
6. It's not the most intuitive of connections, to say the least, but it does nevertheless seem possible that this is an allusion to Lenny Kravitz's 1990 hit "Mr. Cab Driver," about a young black man who has a hard time getting a taxi because of racial prejudice.
7. "Those casual days are over" is sung in such a way that it is reminiscent of "Your ballroom days are over, baby..." from "5 to 1" by the Doors.
8. Agricultural gangs, which were mostly a 19th-century phenomenon, were groups of workers, mostly women and children, who contracted out as a group to do farm labor. Often they were organized by a "gang master" who would bid on jobs and coördinate the laborers efforts. The practice was widely condemned as exploitative and began to be heavily regulated in the latter part of the century; by the beginning of the 20th century it had largely faded out.
9. In English slang, "poxy" means of poor quality or worthless. A "proxy card" is a card filled out, often by a shareholder of a corporation, instructing a stand-in or proxy how to vote in the absence of the voter herself. I have taken these lyrics unchanged from the Lyrics Parade, and I am not sure what their ultimate source may be, but it's not clear to me that MES says "poxy card" or "proxy card" (if the former, it could be a pun on the latter); it sounds like he could be saying something altogether quite different but, whatever it is, I cannot make it out.
Comments (29)

- 1. | 14/06/2014

- 2. | 18/06/2014
psyche?

- 3. | 24/06/2014

- 4. | 26/07/2014

- 5. | 08/08/2016
"Too many dugs"
Drugs? Dugs could be bad in excess too, though.

- 6. | 03/09/2016

- 7. | 28/10/2016
"They walk around wearing young girls in packs"
ie surrounded by "young girls".

- 8. | 29/10/2016

- 9. | 22/02/2017
Reminds me a bit of Keats' poem Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil
http://www.bartleby.com/126/38.html
But more realistically I wonder if "bloody" is just an expletive rather than descriptive, and so we might be talking about dolls' heads or something ("dismantled", in other words, is to be taken literally rather than as a metaphor for decapitation).

- 10. | 02/08/2017

- 11. | 21/02/2018

- 12. | 22/02/2018

- 13. | 23/02/2018

- 14. | 23/02/2018
note 4Manchester bid for the 1996 OLympics, and this presumably would have already been going on in 1993 or 1994 when MES was writing this song.
... is incorrect. The bid referenced in the song would be the bid for the 2000 games, not the 1996 games.

- 15. | 24/02/2018

- 16. | 24/02/2018

- 17. | 24/02/2018
2000:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_bid_for_the_2000_Summer_Olympics
1996:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bids_for_the_1996_Summer_Olympics
And see also this: http://manchester1984.uk/chapters/section-6/chapter-26/
This relatively short account covers the period from 1984 onwards, when the first idea of bidding for the Olympics came up, through lessons from the unsuccessful bids for the Olympic Games to be held in 1992, 1996 and 2000, leading to the successful bid for the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

- 18. | 26/02/2018
I had a quick Google image search for the plantpot people in question, but came up blank, sorry.

- 19. | 26/02/2018
Can't tell from the comments up thread if you used to have this but I always heard "They walk around leering at young girls in packs".
Also after note 8 you have "red tight" - typo?
Re yob, you have it pretty much right. Yob apparently is backslang ('boy'), and similar to 'lout' in that it's a general term of dismissal. Chavs are a more modern phenomena, and more like an actual subculture with specific clothes, and pale gangsta pretentions derived from hip-hop videos.

- 20. | 04/03/2018
I'm still hearing, like Junkman in comment #19, ""They walk around leering at young girls in packs". It's not "wearing".
And I now hear
Avoid the dismantled old heads stuck in bloody plant pots
as
Avoid the dismantled
All heads stuck in bloody plant pots
This doesn't help from the point of view of the lyric making sense, but it is what i'm hearing.

- 21. | 04/03/2018
Stephen Bierley. The Guardian,19 Sep 1990, p.20.Nobody is absolutely sure when the five Olympic rings on Manchester's Town Hall will be dismantled.

- 22. | 04/03/2018

- 23. | 10/03/2018

- 24. | 10/03/2018

- 25. | 10/03/2018

- 26. | 10/03/2018
I agree with the next thing, it doesn't seem to me the heads are dismantled, but the latter are what we are to avoid, based on the timing

- 27. | 10/03/2018

- 28. | 10/03/2018
"Red tight" is probably a legacy from the LP that I never corrected.

- 29. | 16/03/2018
One of Smith's many Twilight Zone references ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Good_Life_(The_Twilight_Zone)