‘Lurking In The Shadows’
from the EP 'Emotional Hardcore'
I wrote this in the year 2000, and again feeling it too severe dropped it from the subsequent album. Having had three previous partners who’d spoken about being raped in the past, and one gang-raped after being drugged I've always felt passionate about wanting to represent their situation somehow. It's a tricky subject to get right, and I could have been much more graphic, but there's a balance between subject matter and titillation. The song preceded the narrated passages by about five years and came from a recording session I was overseeing for a sketch by some pleasant young ladies at Camborne College in Cornwall. They wanted to raise awareness about date rape drugs and kindly gave me permission to use clips for the song.
Lyrically I know there are pointers here which if one were thinking about making a prosecution maybe wouldn't serve well, but I chose to follow the experiences of some of those close who spoke to me about their hellish ordeal and how they responded at the time.
Again I no longer make an apology for a subject that all too often gets the usual clichéd responses initially, without the law actually changing or the treatment of a “Victim” ever-improving a whole lot, and this does need to change!
As live performance goes these more from the ‘Emotional Hardcore’ EP will likely never see the light of day as a live performance, but the intent was to get them “Out” of myself, lay the subject matter to rest and be able to move on!
"Many of us have wounds, but we don’t have to allow them to bleed for the rest of our lives...”
