UPDATE: 23rd June – Well, I wrote a new song, it started off with some South American loops and I built up a new guitar part on my Tele, added some bass guitar, messed around with various percussion samples and ad libbed a melody with a few lyrics from my lyrics book, just to get a guide vocal in place. I expanded and fine tuned them but it was with thoughts of the following Italian tale that gave me the title and the allusion: Latin Class.
Back in my late teens, I went InterRailing around Europe with a friend having been dumped unceremoniously by a university girlfriend. I got robbed in France, got blind drunk on the train to Belgrade, was kicked awake by mounted police outside Amsterdam station, was almost strip searched on the journey home by customs…
None of my adventure, compares to the tale I heard of a great railway journey of the past…Chris King of The Trainhacker shared with me a few of his memories of his loves and travels back in the day, I’ve extrapolated his tweets with some poetic embellishment of my own into the background story for what might become a new song, it’s either going to be call “Well chuffed”, “The other side of the tracks” or “Matching collar and cuffs”, haven’t decided yet.
I fell in love with an Italian traffic cop in Vatican City…she had long, dark hair, a golden tan, the crispest, whitest uniform, matching collar and cuffs. She was smoking Marlboro Reds when to do so was still the height of fashion and passion. She had a gun and she shouted “Ciao, bella!” to the Vespa girls as they whizzed around her roundabout in their pretty frocks and bobby socks.
I borrowed a friend’s 500 to reach the other side of the sun-scorched tracks, the heat-buckled rails. On the long journey home, I found a long dark hair entangled in the webbing of my rucksack…it made me weep and reminded me of the taste of salted caramel gelati and the smell of two-stroke…