The Text Files

The Falklands Suite

This text was written by John Cale for the sleeve notes of the Words For The Dying album.

While the Argentine Flag was being raised on South Georgia, I was feverishly embarking on a comprehensive setting of the collected poems of Dylan Thomas. Each night I would sit with Alan Lanier in his apartment in New York City trashing form one poem to another with the tape running. By the end of the war I had arrived at "Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed" and it seemed that of the nine poems done in all four that felt all of a piece. The interludes came later, around the time of the preparation of the premiere in Amsterdam's Paradiso on Nov. 14 and 15, 1987.

John Cale, june 1989