Our Neck Of The Woods
from the 1985 Captains Of Industry album A Roomful Of Monkeys

The checkout girls look just like pigs In our neck of the woods In frilly blouses and mousey wigs They sit and soil the goods In our neck of the woods The girls fight too In our neck of the woods The menfolk are a human zoo In our neck of the woods In our neck of the woods In our neck of the woods Mutant women man the shops The menfolk stop at home There's nothing much to buy here except Frozen foods and baby clothes In our neck of the woods Our neck of the woods The clever ones are put to death Disfigurement makes sense In our neck of the woods Our neck of the woods We chew the fat we mind our backs We're buying our own homes In our neck of the woods Our neck of the woods Where furnishings are sold in flat-packs Our neck of the woods D I Y for latent livewires Our neck of the woods Is where the new-born come to die Our neck of the woods Our neck of the woods Our neck of the woods words and music Eric Goulden (MCPS / Copyright Control)

By 1983 I'd stopped writing the sort of stuff that I felt people expected of me - nobody actually expected anything of me anymore - I was finished so it didn't matter what I did. So instead of trying to write snappy upbeat pop lyrics about boys and girls I started writing about what was around me. And what was around me was the Medway Towns where I was subsisting on the dole along with just about everybody else I knew. I've always wanted to paint a true picture of this wonderful country of ours - western civilisation. The Captains Of Industry album was an attempt to do that. Lyrically I think I got it about right but the production, particularly the vocal performances, let it down in my opinion. I wrote Our Neck Of The Woods on a green plastic Olivetti typewriter which I later threw into the fire in a drunken rage. I just typed it out and didn't alter a thing. The tune took about five minutes to get together. I felt as though I was just the medium - some sort of antenna - the song was already there floating around in bits, waiting for somebody to pick it up and assemble it. Nobody liked the Captains Of Industry album but I think that was because it was so close to the truth - It made people feel uncomfortable.