Peter Hammill Modern Lyrics

Jericho's strange, throbbing with life at its heart - people are drawn together, simultaneously torn apart.... Foundations are shattered in the city inside the barricaded doors; hiding behind their walls, lonely as night falls, maybe the people are waiting for trumpets.

Babylon's strange, seventh wonder of the earth - gardens ablaze in colour, slowly rotting in the dirt and, with your head on fire, you can't really see. The hanging gardens sing, but with a hollow ring : the life is false, it's killing me....

Don't look back or you'll turn to stone; look around before your life is overgrown with concrete slabs. On your back the searching eyes that stab between chintz curtains, glinting, but never owning to a name... like the inmates of asylums all the citizens are contagiously insane....
Atlantis is strange, the explosion of an age - no-one really knows what to do, and the city is a cage. It traps in ashen hours and concrete towers, imprisons in the social order. The city's lost its way, madness takes hold today... I can't live under water.