Link to the page for the captioned Album using the same image as featured there. — Pokeweed Wormfence

Lyrics

Gaze

Apple Tree Pub

Crawley 1992

The only sighting of Voice Of The Rain in the wild occurred when doing the sound for a couple of other bands at a gig meant an opportunity to play a few tunes whilst the audience came in. This grew to something of a marathon set as the main support pulled out. ‘Song For Anja’ was inspired by an interview Richard did with Anja Huwe of Xmal Deutschland for an Aberdeen University magazine.

Videomatic Presentations

On a good day down hill with a following wind if the mood takes and inspiration strikes I’ve been known to knock out the odd video of questionable relevance to Voice Of The Rain songs. This is their story.

The list includes the unused song Shadowlands from 1987 whose one slight flaw split the duo for four years in one of our many falling outs. Otherwise I may have been in an unsuccessful band in Aberdeen rather than Sussex. Decades later it may not be so obvious what annoyed me but there’s a clue at the end of the video.

Bygones

The Voice Of The Rain

Hear the poet write, disjointed, a biography;
(Though inconsistencies beg order doubts are refused).
Step out of the shadows + into the play
Make your mark to pay them off
As you taste the audience – empty –
Applauding to a man.
(What man can stand(?))
When the brink is teetered over all there is another brink.
(Breathe deep the sterile air
And prepare for ascension, Footfruit, old friend.)
The dramas in which we play (games of chance)
can make the poorest rich.
(I contain a multitude)
Step into the shadows + out of the play
Be franc enough to pay your way
As the hounds bay at your kneecaps
+ the Last Post is recalled
Taste our polite refusal
– Upstanding (Aren’t we all?).
(Which man would leave(?))
Boy scouts searching for arrows,
As the black hat idly sits, waiting,
On the bench for words it knows.
The now sung, packed, unpacked,
Is so slow to guide him on,
His paths are gone.
(A Multitude cries out with remedies)
All that is needed is an ending to the unending,
A word to the wise.
A.F. Harrold 23rd June 1993

Cover Story

The Original Cassette Releases

Fold out insert from the cassette demo Old Age Echoes. It's hand written and drawn by Richard with the front rather abstract in conception.

You might notice the album ‘Other People’s Songs’ in amongst the cassette sleeves above which included, amongst many others, Kevin Coyne’s ‘I’ve Got The Photographs’ and the Indiego Girls’ ‘Southland In The Springtime’.

Germany Rhymes

Recorded in 1995 for the English school Richard was teaching at in Berlin. His sister Rebecca shares the billing playing Hamish to his Dougal.

The Voice Of The Rain

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to Heaven, whence, vaguely formed, altogether changed, and yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn,
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin, and make pure
and beautify it:
(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfillment, wandering,
Recked or unrecked, duly with love returns.)
Walt Whitman