Songs: People Are All Right (if they are given half a chance)

notes / gigs / releases

I got home
From the pub
I'd have a lovely time
I told you
That he sent his love
You asked how's his wife?
How's she getting on in her new job?
How's the kids since they lost the dog?
I had no idea
I never thought to ask
We'd spent the whole night
Talking crap

We'd discussed
How to design a bus
Are double deckers better with one stair or two?
Is James Bond
Meant to be the same one
In every film, or is it a title like M or Q?

Star Trek TV series - which is worst?
What band's second album's shorter than the first?
These and many other
Vital questions had been asked
We'd spent the whole night talking crap


Since we've been talking surely
Moutain ranges have been formed
We've known each other since before
Our goalkeeper was born

Next time we get together
Even if takes all night
We'll go through the news agenda
And we'll the world to rights
Set the world to rights

So we convened
After work the next week
We had a lot to do so we began at six
We kicked off
With disputes about God
I said I think we're going to need some crisp

How can tolerance deal with hate?
That one took until twenty to eight
Then how to balance free speech with the corporate media's power
Got sorted in a quarter of an hour

Sex and gender, race relations
Poverty and Crime
We'd answered all these questions
In advance of closing time
And as we clinked our whiskies
To success we had to laugh
To think we could have spent the whole night talking crap

In the morning I leapt out of bed
Eager to revisit what we'd said
On a piece of paper there was just eleven words
And a picture of a penis shooting sperm

People are all right if they are given half the chance
I'd like to see the Dalia Llama disagree with that
It's a mantra that I want the entire world to chant
People are all right if they are given half the chance

People are all right if they are given half the chance
People are all right if they are given half the chance
People are all right if they are given half the chance
People are all right if they are given half the chance


And now I've done my bit I'm knackered, so I'm going back
Next time I'm in the pub I'm talking crap
Next time I'm in the pub I'm talking crap

Published by Wipe Out Music Publishing

This is one of those songs I wrote when I was MEANT to be finishing off some of the other ones, which always seems to be a good way to go about it. I'd recently been to the pub with Mr P Myland and, as usual, had had a lovely time without really discussing anything of IMPORT or NEWS. I'd made a note of this as a possible idea for a SONG in by Notebook, and spotted it while thumbing through to find something to fit a nice tune I had started strumming while avoiding finishing off the songs I was supposed to be doing.

The song dictated its own course as it went along. Initially it was JUST going to be about talking crap in the pub, then it decided it was going to move on to trying to solve all the problems of the world but failing, THEN I realised it would be more fun if we DID solve all the problems but were too tiddly to remember what we'd said, and FINALLY I thought that I might as well go the whole hog and have us work it all out.

My FAVOURITE thing though is that I wrote the line "on a piece of paper there were just eleven words" BEFORE I knew what they solution would actually be. Imagined my DELIGHT when "people are all right when they are given half the chance" popped into my head and I counted the words! I could hardly believe it - even as I've just typed it out again now I had to RECOUNT to be sure. That's got to be a sign, right?

UPDATE: After a couple of months of not really liked the original title of "In The Pub (Talking Crap)" we BRANESTORMED it at a Validators practice and came up with "Two Nights, One Pub" instead!