Voice Of The Rain written in a typeface based on Walt Whitman's handwriting

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

Lyrics

Gaze

Apple Tree Pub

Playlist: Voice Of The Rain – Live Crawley 1992

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.

Playlist: Voice Of The Rain

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.

Fold out insert from the cassette version of Old Age Echoes. The front is a drawing of a man with hands held as if in prayer. The text is in the finest Letraset.

Fold out insert from the cassette version of Building Then Burning. The front is a bad photocopy of a photograph of Richard.

Fold out insert from the cassette version of Pokeweed Wormfence. The front is a photo collage of a chap with his arms out in the rain, a woman with hands in pockets and legs far apart and another chap who seems to be leaping into the air in the Superman fashion.

Fold out insert from the cassette version of Other People's Angels. The front is a wood cutting of an American Indian Chief.

Fold out insert from the cassette version of Other People's Songs. It's just the text of the title and a track list.

Fold out insert from the cassette version of Reign. The front is a drawing of a large pair of lips. No, I can't remember why.

Fold out insert from the cassette version of Chant The Beauty. The front is a photograph of the moon.

Fold out insert from the cassette version of Einmal Ist Keinmal. The front is a wood cutting of an eye.

Fold out insert from the cassette version of No Way Out But Through. The front is a drawing of a cafe as seen in a reflection.

Fold out insert from the cassette version of Further Afield. Is largely a poem by AF Harrold which will be somewhere on this site but I haven't decided where yet.

Fold out insert from the cassette version of Further Afield. Has some sort of DNA diagram on the front and the track list.

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’.

Quicksand Years

A booklet to accompany the three albums recorded in the summer of 1993.

Mistakes and all.

Part of an unreleased booklet that was due to come with the three albums we recorded in the summer of 1993.

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 Accompanying Booklet

The front cover of the booklet that accompanied the Sprachschule Mouroum cassette for young German learners of English.

Text from the booklet that accompanied the Sprachschule Mouroum cassette for young German learners of English.

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