A black cavalcade winds its way through the back streets
Flowers piled high on a wooden box
With friends and relations sat in rows in the back seats
All looking shaky cos it came as a shock
A black cavalcade winds its way through the back streets
Some poor soul took his final taxi

And there's only one destination in the final taxi

Up through the town to the garden of rest
Riding in style in a long wooden box
No fare on the meter they'll be paying by cheque -
This is one fare you won't see up on the clock
Riding in style in a long wooden box
Some poor soul took his final taxi

And there's only one destination in the final taxi
Only one destination in the final taxi
Only one destination
Only one destination
Only one destination
Only one destination
There's only one destination in the final taxi

They lowered him down into a hole in the ground
Threw in the flowers and shovelled earth on the top
Then the cars pulled away from the garden of rest
For a funeral tea with twenty five guests
The cars pulled away for the funeral tea
Cos some poor soul took his final taxi

And there's only one destination in the final taxi...

words and music Eric Goulden / Wreckless Eric (Zomba Music)

 

 

I was standing on a street corner round the corner from Pathway Studios in Islington with Larry Wallis. It was January 1978, we were making my first album. We used to work late so this would be about one or two o'clock in the morning. Larry looked like all the Furry Freak Brothers rolled into one - leather jacket, mirrored shades, enormous amounts of frizzy black hair... You can see what he looked like on the cover of Stiffs Live Stiffs:

Except that it's in black and white and the original photo was in colour and we all had feet, but you get the idea. Larry's the siamese twin growing out of Nick Lowe's shoulder. Nick Lowe's the large one who looks disquietingly like Nick Garvey from Ducks Deluxe. I'm the handsome one (I was pulling a face) in the tartan jacket. I don't know why I put this photo in - it hardly illustrates whatever point I've just forgotten I was trying to make. But you get the general idea - taxi drivers didn't stop for me and Larry. As yet another black cab turned its light off and disappeared round the corner I said to Larry, 'There goes the final taxi.' And there was the song title.

As showbiz annecdotes go that was fairly crappy.

I wrote the song about three months later and made a demo of it. I thought it sounded like an early Bowie kind of thing. I played the organ on it. The real recording was produced by Pete Solley who was a Real Musician. So I wasn't allowed to play the organ part - he insisted that he had to do it. I ask what the difference was and he said, 'The difference is I'm a keyboard player, you're not.' He got me to show him the line, then he played it wrong. And he put in that cod reggae bit. And Joe Brown's wife (mother of Sam Brown) did the backing vocals.

I'd like to re-record it because Solley's production is much too kitch and he lost the Englishness of the song. He made it into a novelty record and I think that's a shame. I never played it back in the Stiff days except for once in Fremantle at the end of an Australian tour in 1980 and that was actually the last gig I did while I was on Stiff Records.