Pulp
Wickerman
(Jarvis Cocker, Steve Mackey, Candida Doyle, Nick Banks, Mark Webber)
intro(2x)
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Verse
Just behind the station
Before you reach the traffic island
A river runs through a concrete channel
I took you there once
(I think it was after the Leadmill)
The water was dirty
And it smelt of industrialisation
Little misters coughing their lungs up
In globules the colour of tomato ketchup
Interlude
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But it flows
Yeah it flows
Yeah, underneath the city
Through dirty brickwork conduits
Connecting white witches on the moor
With Pre-Raphaelites down in Broomhall
Beneath the old Trebor factory
That burned down in the early Seventies
Leaving an antiquated sweetshop smell
And caverns of nougat and caramel
Interlude
Nougat
Yeah, nougat and caramel
And the river flows on...
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Yeah, the river flows on,
beneath podgy 15-year-olds addicted to coffee whitener,
courting couples naked on Northern Upholstery,
and pensioners gathering dust like bowls of plastic tulips.
And it finally comes above ground again at Forge Dam,
the place where we first met...
I went there again for old time's sake,
hoping to find the child's toy horse ride
that played such a ridiculously tragic tune.
It was still there,
but none of the kids seemed interested in riding it.
And the café ˇas still there too,
the same press-in plastic letters on the price list,
and scuffed formica-top tables.
I sat as close as possible to the seat
where I met you that autumn afternoon,
and then, after what seemed like hours of thinking about it,
I finally took your face in my hands,
and I kissed you for the first time,
and a feeling like electricity flowed through my whole body,
and I immediately knew I'd entered a completely different world...
and all that time,
in the background,
the sound of that ridiculously heartbreaking child's ride outside...
At the other end of town,
the river flows underneath an old railway viaduct.
I went there with you once (except you were somebody else),
and we gazed down at the sludgy brown surface of the water together.
Then, a passer-by told us that it used to be a local custom
to jump off the viaduct into the river
when coming home from the pub on a Saturday night,
but that this custom had died out
when someone had jumped and landed too near to the riverbank,
and had sunk in the mud there,
and drowned before anyone could reach her.
Maybe he just made the whole story up.
You'd never get me to jump off that bridge.
No chance.
Never in a million years.
Bm A D E G F# Bm E Bm F#
Bm
Yeah, a river runs underneath this city
A
I'd like to go there with you now, my pretty
D
And follow it on for miles and miles
E
Below the people's ordinary lives
G
Occasionally catching a glimpse of the moon
F#
Through manhole covers along the route
Bm
Yeah it's dark sometimes
E
But if you hold my hand
Bm F#
I think I know the way
Oh, this is as far as we got last time
But if we go just another mile
We will surface, surrounded by grass and trees
And the flyover that takes the cars to cities
Buds that explode at the slightest touch
Nettles that sting (but not too much)
I've never been past this point
What lies ahead, I really could not say
And I used to live just by the river
In a disused factory just off the Wicker
And the river flowed by day after day
And one day, I thought
One day I will follow it
But that day never came
I moved away and lost track
Tonight I am thinking about making my way back
I may find you there
Float on
Wherever the river may take me
Wherever the river may take me
Wherever the river may take us
Wherever it wants us to go
Wherever it wants us to go...