New memoir of the noted social critic singer
Leon rosselson, “palaces of gold,”
from: palaces of gold,
“If the sons of company directors,
And judges’ private daughters,
Had to got 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.”
Leon Rosselson is one of the most astutely acerbic folk writers I have encountered. His catalogue of work would make your head spin. Over 50 lps of some repute or other, a raft of childrens’ books, and intensive social activism. But it is his unflinching and dire looks at the mechanics of society that became a pallet from which he launched his radical vision.: changing minds with songs of evidence. In “Palaces of Gold” he paints one such incisive, poignant portrait.
