Marillion Songs - Gazpacho Lyrics

Marillion - Gazpacho

Marillion - Gazpacho Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Afraid Of Sunlight
Released: 1995

Gazpacho Lyrics

Saw you walking on your velvet lawn
Is it lonely on the moon?
You took a dive and swallowed all you could
Did you drink too much too soon?
Nothing left for you to fight about
And no one wants to see you try
The nearest neighbours are a mile away
Does the ocean hear you cry?

Punching at the sky
They say the King is losin´ his grip again
They said you´re bullet proof, they said you feel no pain
It seems the hero is misunderstood again

Is it love or is it surgery
Makes her seem so ill at ease
As she´s begging you to please calm down
In her silk Armani on her knees

Did you carry out those threats I heard
Or were you only playing macho?
And the stains on her Versace scarf
Were they really just Gazpacho?

They say the King is watching his back again
They say the King is losing his grip again
Raging like a bull to an empty ring
D´you think they will forgive a hero anything?

Now the ring is just a band of gold
And your wife needs police protection
While you´re sparring with the journalists
You´re trying to win back her affection
Is this what it means to be a man
Boxing up all your emotion
So now she´s gone and you´re alone at last
You can tell it to the ocean

They say the King is losing his grip again
They say the King is countin´ his numbered days
You never lost a fight in your whole life
You never had no trouble sleepin´ through the night
The bottle and the doctor get you through the day
The boys who run the house´ll make it all okay
You think they will forgive a hero anything
Maybe Hollywood
But maybe then again

Now the ring is just a band of gold
Drive the road

Writer/s: STEVEN THOMAS ROTHERY, MARK KELLY, PETER TREWAVAS, IAN MOSELY, JOHN HELMER, STEVE HOGARTH
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., Universal Music Publishing Group
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Gazpacho

Gazpacho is a kind of tomato soup. In this song, Steve Hogarth sings:

Did you carry out those threats I heard
Or were you only playing macho?
And the stains on her Versace scarf
Were they really just Gazpacho?

This is a vague reference to the O.J. Simpson trial, which was the big news story around the time the song was written. In the trail, the American football star was accused of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and a waiter named Ronald Goldman. Despite blood evidence pointing to Simpson, he was found not guilty in a trial that garnered massive news coverage.

Gazpacho never factored into the case, but it's a great word to sing, letting Hogarth flex his vocals a bit.

Steve Hogarth wrote the lyrics with John Helmer, an author he often collaborated with. In addition to the Simpson case, the movie Raging Bull, starring Robert de Niro as a tormented boxer, was an inspiration. The line, "Now the ring is just a band of gold" is something Helmer came up with, referring to how life in a boxing ring gave way to marriage.

Musically, Hogarth says the band was "trying to capture the spirit of early Yes" on this track. The bass is out front in the mix, which suited Marillion bass player Pete Trewavas just fine. "This is the perfect song for a bass player to show off in," he wrote in press materials. "It has the pounding verses and lovely high runs in the choruses. I remember us writing this and getting the verses together. I instantly started playing the heavy Rickenbacker type bass line for the verse and wonder if I would get away with it."

The bit at the beginning which sounds like John Lennon was taken from a film called John Lennon: A Journey In The Life, where the actor Bernard Hill speaks his words. The passage used comes from Lennon's 1980 Playboy interview, where he said, "I would find myself seeing hallucinatory images of my face changing and becoming cosmic and complete."