George, You Only Told the Truth

A song by Nick Garrett

Click pic to hear:

It was time, I reckoned, for a George Orwell song. So I wrote one on my ukulele and my friend and pianist Stu helped me record it. We produced it ourselves back in February '02 and had a great time doing it. It was a well known fact that there were no known recordings of Orwell's voice in existence so I did a few impressions into a mini disc player. It wasn't throaty enough and sounds a bit effeminate, but there you go. We treated the voice recording with an old scratched record effect and mixed them into the song. We rigged up an old drum kit for main percussion and even used some pots and pans if I recall correctly. The various instruments such as xylophone and sitar were synthesized on the keyboard and played, like the piano and organ, superlatively by Stu. I sang and played the ukulele. Stu engineered and mixed and we knocked the arrangement together from my chords and vocal lines. It took about a week.

The motivation for writing the song was to make a simple, fun tribute to one of the great writers of the last one hundred years.

Oh George, you only told the truth

George, you only told the truth

Oh George!

He was born in India in nineteen hundred and three

Despite attending Eton, it wasn't hard to see

That something in the Empire smelt like an un-flushed bowl

And England was a family, with the wrong members in control

(chorus)

He joined the Burmese Police and felt Imperial power in his boots

But then he went Down and Out in Paris and smelt poverty at its roots.

He caught the train to Spain, where Socialism was to be seen

And getting shot on the Aragon Front fulfilled his soldier's dream.

He undertook to write a book, filled with pessimism

About Winston Smith's losing fight wih Oligarchical Collectivism

Now George was fading fast, and he wanted to stay alive

To say that if two and two made more than four,

Then decency couldn't survive

chorus

You lived a life rare with honesty

You was man of the match, you had it tough, you could have been a millionaire

If you'd just lived a few more years, Oh George you would have had forty thousand fits.

'.....English apples are also outstandingly good, particularly the Cox's Orange Pippin.'

(c) words and music and this sound recording, all rights reserved (c) 2002 Nick Garrett.