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Lustra

Lustra

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Tracklisting

  • Bulldog Baby 4:32 Lyrics

    Bulldog Baby

    Stood up at a border street
    A souped up strut on swollen feet
    My loss remembered incomplete
    What memory knows I can’t repeat
    Offered army soul salvation
    Sandwich choice of God and nation
    Haloed voices, chiselled faces
    Fill my head with empty spaces

    Out of the breakdown of the whole
    Back to the choices on repeat
    Out of a life put on hold

    Once again a bulldog baby
    Classified as cheap and lazy
    Inner pity meat mutation
    Pay the price for approbation
    Welcome to the new dictators
    Power, drugs and imitators

    Out of the breakdown of the whole
    Back to the choices on repeat
    Out of a life put on hold

    Mother’s dressed in alligator
    All good children love to hate her

    Out of the breakdown of the whole
    Back to the choices on repeat
    Out of a life put on hold
    Into the fallout of belief

  • I'm Not a Saint 3:45 Lyrics

    I'm Not a Saint

    Everybody’s staring at my…
    Everybody’s out to catch my…eye…
    I’ve gotta think it over
    I’ve gotta think it over

    Everybody’s got somebody to…
    All I wanted was a body to…hide…
    I’ve gotta think it over
    I’ve gotta think it over

    I’m not a saint. I’m not a saint. I’m not a saint. I’m not a saint.

    Dog is barking, head is hurting
    Car is chasing, hands are dirty I’ve gotta think it over
    I’ve gotta think it over

    I’m not a saint. I’m not a saint.
    (It’s the way I feel inside)
    I’m not a saint. I’m not a saint.
    (Takes me over sometimes)

  • Here Comes The Big Rush 4:25 Lyrics

    Here Comes The Big Rush

    Save your point of view
    For the manic charm that he puts you through
    When he wears your pearls, your ruby dress
    And he looks so good with his sunken chest
    There’s a certain charm
    To the pretty boy that is on my arm
    He’s my double friend, a boy and a girl
    when he says:

    Paint my face, lick your mouth
    Fake a yawn and we’ll go out and glow
    We’re on our way to somewhere in particular
    I’ll take you somewhere, where you haven’t been
    And I’ll show you a good time, like you’ve never seen
    Here comes the big rush

    There’s a special ring
    To his Cuban heels and his six-pack swing
    His mother’s clothes are his new disguise
    And his good advice when he says:

    Vanity’s a virtue, lets no one in to hurt you
    I’ll take you somewhere, where you haven’t been
    And I’ll show you a good time, like you’ve never seen
    Here comes the big rush

    You’re one of the boys
    Pump that pipe dream, sell you something
    New, new, new
    We’re on our way to somehwere in particular
    I’ll take you somewhere, where you haven’t been
    And I’ll show you a good time, like you’ve never seen
    Here comes the big rush

    You’re one of the boys
    Pump that pipe dream, sell you something
    pump that pipe dream, sell you something
    New new

  • Iris Art 3:45 Lyrics

    Iris Art

    Shattered glass, shooting stars, silver sparks
    Come and shine on me
    Take your time, don’t hurry baby
    Break a smile, when you come to me

    I’m up on a high
    Catch me if you fall
    Up on a high
    Your love fills me like a waterfall

    Iris art, skin on skin, let me in
    Take a ride with me
    Take a trip, don’t worry baby
    Love the way we satisfy a need

    I’m up on a high
    Catch me if you fall
    Up on a high
    Catch me if you fall
    You love fills me like a waterfall

    Love. Love. Love. Love.
    Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.

    Slaughterhouse nursery rhyme
    Numb it with your anodyne
    Seraphim serpentine
    Wrap me in your anodyne heart

    I’m up on a high
    Catch me if you fall
    Up on a high
    Catch me if you fall
    You love fills me like a waterfall

  • The World Is Flat 4:02 Lyrics

    The World Is Flat

    It is not too late to carry on
    So you’ve made mistakes
    And here’s another one
    Oh but you deserve another chance
    Chase it round until you face yourself

    The world is flat and we are insane
    And we have fallen off again
    It really helps to know the way

    What if you take more than you deserve
    What if you give all and you get nothing back
    Sell your soul not your stereo
    Take your favourite songs and sail off

    The world is flat and we are insane
    And we have fallen off again
    The world is right and we are mad
    And world opinions where it’s at
    Don’t rate the score don’t take the blame
    The world is flat and we’re insane

    I won’t be sad I won’t be sorry
    I’ve no regrets and i don’t worry
    I’ll roll the sail and i won’t let go
    I’ll ride the wave until tomorrow

    There are some who do and some do not
    There are some who can’t
    And we’re the other ones
    Shape your fate, let your body go
    Take your favourite songs and sail away

    The world is flat and we are insane
    And we have fallen off again
    The world is right and we are mad
    And world opinions where it’s at
    Don’t rate the score don’t take the blame
    The world is flat and we’re insane

    lalalalalalala…, lalalalalalala…

  • Everyone Knows Better 3:42 Lyrics

    Everyone Knows Better

    I know there’s a certain amount
    To what you’re thinking
    My hopes never seem to amount
    To more than stopping smoking

    Everyone knows better. I’ll do it anyway
    Everyone knows better oh yeah

    Heroes never seem
    To allow for self-expression
    Lovers stick around
    To allow what they think you’re missing

    Everyone knows better. I’ll do it anyway
    Everyone knows better. I’ll do it anyway

    Looking around
    To avoid what’s in front of you
    Good intentions
    Wrapped round like some old sweater
    A vain hope
    That it might be good for you

    You mind is made
    Make your mind up
    Make your mind up
    Make your mind up
    We like to make the same mistakes

    Sunshine
    A ray of hope in a hopeless situation
    Suntanned
    Your reward for the hopeful hours that you spend
    Burning

    Everyone knows better. I’ll do it anyway
    Everyone knows better. I’ll do it anyway
    Everyone knows better. I’ll do it anyway
    Everyone thinks they know better
    I’ll do it anyway

    Looking around
    To avoid what’s in front of you
    Good intentions
    Wrapped round like some old sweater
    A vain hope
    That it might be good for you
    Your mind is made

  • Wired On 3:23 Lyrics

    Wired On

    I wanna get wired on something new
    I wanna get high on something
    I wanna get wired on something new

    Every wide open space
    It’s the gaping holes that get to you
    They frighten you
    An echo of your emptiness
    Every lie that you’ve fed
    You can kiss my open spaces
    I am safe from you
    I’m better now, I’m better now

    I wanna get wired on something new
    I wanna get high on something
    I wanna get wired on something new

    Every scan I’ve erased
    Leave a memory that will prey on you
    An overspill
    I hope it will, I hope it will
    All the time I have wasted

    Tasted Bitterness
    Now I confess, you waste my space
    At any time, at any rate

    I wanna get wired on something new
    I wanna get high on something
    I wanna get wired on something new

    Now you’re up against a wall
    It’s the other side that scares you
    And you’re groping through the hole
    And you’re hoping for a way out
    Your strength is on it’s last legs
    You could be somewhere else
    Instead you’re blinded by the way out
    The way out
    And it’s right here

    I wanna get wired on something new
    I wanna get high on something
    I wanna get wired on something new
    I wanna get high on something
    I wanna get high on something

  • O 4:12 Lyrics

    O

    I get it on
    When I lay my fingers on
    Let me drift away
    Take me to a place I have known before
    Let me hear the words you know I adore
    Let me slip away to a world I know

    When you sing
    Oh oh oh oh take me
    I am a slave to your charms
    Turn it on

    And I wanna celebrate
    I can hear your song
    Rushing through my veins, it surrounds me now
    Touching me inside, I can ride the sound

    When you sing
    Oh oh oh oh take me
    I am a slave to your charms
    Turn it on

    Can I lay my fingers on?
    Soaking in the way you shine
    Your rhythm slides around my mind
    I’ve really got it now
    Serenades that nearly split my senses
    Oh so special
    Turn it on

    When you sing
    Oh oh oh oh take me
    I am a slave to your charms
    Turn it on

    And I wanna celebrate
    Get it on
    Get it on
    Get it on
    Get it on

  • Bleed 2:41 Lyrics

    Bleed

    Where and why this journey lies
    With faded sighs for every mile
    I’m awake
    Hunger bleeds in each and everyone of us
    We chase our dreams unaware

    And I never had the chance to say no
    And I never had the chance to say no
    Don’t walk away

    Where’s the trust the one in us
    Entwined, inclined and gladly blind
    Fade away
    Hunger bleeds in each and everyone of us
    And now I’m lost

    And I never had the chance to say no
    And I never had the chance to say no
    Don’t walk away
    Say no

  • Paradise 2:35 Lyrics

    Paradise

    In all day, out all night
    You and I see the sights in paradise
    Very nice
    Take me home, do it ’til your hear aches
    And then you’ll know my mind

    And if I stay
    I’d only drive you mad
    I’m not that stable, I’m not so right in a way
    I find myself at odds wanting to be here
    Never arrive

    Love and Peace
    Ill at ease with naked greed
    Hunger feeding, aim to please, what a teaser
    Maybe I owe it to my own ways
    But then I know my mind
    You see, I know, I’ve been there before

    And if I stay
    I’d only drive you mad
    I’m not that stable, I’m not so right in a way
    I find myself at odds wanting to be here
    Never arrive

    If I stay
    I’m not the type of girl
    Waitin for someone
    Waiting at home there’s a way out
    And only time can tell
    Will be here, Will I begone
    In all day, out all night
    You and I see the sights in paradise

  • Angel B 5:26 Lyrics

    Angel B

    Time stands still
    When you fear your hope is gonna fade
    Hope doesn’t come
    ‘Til you catch your fear and give it away
    I’m waiting for the tide
    The darkness of this night
    To fade into the night
    And it won’t be long
    I hope it won’t be long
    Oh no
    Told me they would come
    Told me they were gonna take him away
    He’s the only one
    He’s the one that makes me feel this way
    And don’t you criticise
    What you can’t understand
    He’s the pulse inside my hand
    He’s the only one
    He is the only one

    I see, hear, taste, I breathe him
    Seven years and thirteen days
    Oh I wouldn’t forsake him
    My own disturbed angel boy
    I would wait a thousand years for you

    Breathe into your heart
    Let me taste the colour of your core
    Memory rewind to the heady time we had before

    Coming up, I’m coming down
    Reaching up and falling down
    The time is coming round
    And it won’t be long
    I hope it won’t be long

    I see, hear, taste, I breathe him
    Seven years and thirteen days
    Oh I wouldn’t forsake him
    My own disturbed angel boy
    I would wait a thousand years for you

    Coming up, I’m coming down
    Reaching up and falling down
    The time is coming round
    And it won’t be long
    I know it won’t be long

    I see, hear, taste, I breathe him
    Seven years and thirteen days
    Oh I wouldn’t forsake him
    My own disturbed angel boy
    I see, hear, taste, I breathe him
    Seven years and thirteen days
    Oh I wouldn’t forsake him
    My own disturbed angel boy I would wait a thousand years for you
    I would wait a thousand years for you
    I would wait a thousand years for you

  • Lustra 3:55 Lyrics

    Lustra

    Lustra
    There’s something hiding behind your immaculate smile
    You have always known, so let it out

    Lustra
    I fell your anger swell the radical in your style, girl
    Take the cross you bear and throw it out

    She’s coming up, coming up
    Breathe it in and let it out
    Let it go, be yourself, take a shot
    It’s what you’ve always known now
    You’ve always known now
    What you waiting for

    Lustra
    It’s gonna take as long, as long as it will take
    To strike a match to your silence
    Take the pain you bear and burn it out

    She’s coming up, coming up
    Breathe it in and let it out
    Let it go, be yourself, take a shot and give it out
    Coming up, coming up
    Breathe it in and let it out
    Let it go, be yourself, take a shot
    It’s what you’ve always known now
    You’ve always known now
    What you waiting for

    Lustra
    Don’t you know where’s no tomorrow
    In a sense, there’s no way out
    Innocence is all you’re born with
    Inner sense dictates the way you wheel
    The way you deal with knowing who you are

    Lustra
    You know where hell is when you
    Fight the maze of denial
    Do it
    You’ve gotta take a shot
    Give all you’ve got for your dreams girl

    She’s coming up, coming up
    Breathe it in and let it out
    Let it go, be yourself, take a shot and give it out
    Coming up, coming up
    Breathe it in and let it out
    Let it go, be yourself, take a shot
    It’s what you’ve always known now
    You’ve always known now

  • US EDITION BONUS TRACKS

  • Heroes in June 2:41
  • Mouth Almighty 4:00
  • Drive Myself Distracted 4:22
  • Falling Flame 4:05
  • Holding the Wire 3:34

Credits

Engineer – Niven Garland
Engineer, Mixed By – Roy Spong
Producer, Mixed By – Gil Norton
Written-By – Johansson, Madan

Sonya's notes

The route from West London to Hampstead was always better on the back of Glenn or Andy’s motorbikes. It was Spring 1997 and they had both bought black and chrome Harleys, which were so loud that they’d set off the car alarms in my street. We were on our way to Air Studios in Hampstead to record our third album, LUSTRA. It was an amazing place, set in a vast old church and owned by the legend that is George Martin. Everything was on a grand scale here, both in quality and expense. There was also the tale of the angelic ghost that some swore they had encountered high up at the top of the stairs. I sat on those stairs, half hoping to encounter her, but she only came to me in my imagination.

We had been in exile for a whole year, while the dispute between Rhythm King and Sony took place and we were dying to get on with recording LUSTRA. Rhythm King, our label for the first two albums, was now looking to Arista for funding. Sony was determined to keep us and made it clear at a round table meeting with the band and various very important persons from the label. The head of A&R at the time, Rob Stringer, came in late and charmed the socks off us. The deal was done. A big budget, a big deal and a big future was the offered horizon set out in front of us.

The Fortress was a rehearsal complex in Shoreditch, that had become one of our familiar stomping grounds and a place to get the songs for LUSTRA into shape. Every place has its glory days and The Fortress was buzzing at the time. Primal Scream, Swervedriver, Tricky, Oasis and many others were sometimes to be found in it’s windowless corridors.   Shaun, the owner, was astute and convivial, in equal measure and Fatty, (appararently named after the size of the lines he took), was a roadie for many a band, when he wasn’t running the café with his wife.   He once bandaged his own hand after a severe “blood brother ritual” at a hardcore club when with us in Prague, but that’s another story.   I vaguely remember a few last minute lock-ins with a flow of enough drugs ‘n’ booze to create a real party atmosphere. I was more in tune with a little black cat that would greet us outside the post war council flats we would pass, just before the entrance to the Fortress. She was always there, purring away. She was a little beauty.

We asked for Gil Norton to be the producer for LUSTRA (based on our love for the band, PIXIES). Gil said yes and someone (Gil?), suggested Air Studios. I don’t remember as much as I should about recording any of our albums, perhaps because the vocals were always recorded quickly. We brought in an electronic aspect to this album.   The demos were rough diamond versions of how we wanted the songs to sound. Gil hired the services of Ben Hillier and Mark Phythian, to work on that side of things. Mark spent nearly all his time with us, glued to the computer screen, working on Pro-Tools and Ben used his talents to add some of his unique, quirky style to some of the songs. The process started with laying down the drums and then layering the instruments, doing a rough mix and then adding vocals. Sometimes the band would all play together, depending on the vibe needed. Ian Dury, who must also have been working at AIR at the time, once held the door open for me, giving me a lovely smile. I was too shy to speak to him.

BULLDOG BABY, the first track on LUSTRA, is still the only song that detoured from the way Glenn and I have always written, in that the words existed before the music. It was a poem I’d penned, influenced in part, by Orwell’s “Down and out in Paris and London”. Various subject matters for other LUSTRA offerings: I’M NOT A SAINT- schizophrenic confessions from the point of view of a bad deed. HERE COMES THE BIG RUSH – The rush of excitement from bending the rules. IRIS ART – a psychedelic love homage. THE WORLD IS FLAT – Thinking from outside the box, or sphere, in this case.

We hired a bona-fide 24-piece orchestra for the euphonious arrangements on this album. It was thrilling to hear them play our songs. We crept around the orchestra room at Angel Studios, in awe of the immense sound. (We were in a smaller room at Air and moved to Angel specifically for the orchestral recordings).

For the B-sides, we returned to one of our favourite recording studios, (long since gone), Wessex Studios in Islington. It was also in a converted church, but very different to Air Studios. It was rougher and by now, permanently held together by temporary measures and gaffer tape. The Clash, Queen, Sex Pistols, Talk Talk had all recorded great music here during its heyday. You could feel the creativity in the place. On FALLING FLAME, it’s kind of amusing to know that my voice was wavering, not by any stylised affectation, but by being out of my head. I never could keep up with the others!

Sony decided (for us, unlike before, when we decided for us), to use a design company called Tomato, to do the artwork and the video for the first single, THE WORLD IS FLAT. They were a disparate bunch of Soho based Artists with the image of a renegade collective. They were bloody good. The limited edition gatefold artwork for LUSTRA was a beautiful, covetable package of sky blue, gold and black with Dirk, the designer’s photos of my hand holding a reflective card and quotes from the songs. Sony packaged the standard design Cd’s as a little more ordinary.

We were booked to play the festival circuit around Europe, in between recording and mixing. Debbie left the band sometime in this haze, bad blood and bad vibes, sadly. Someone recommended a guitarist, a young guy from Hemel Hempstead, called Julian Cooper. His father is a well- respected guitar luthier and while at the time, Julian was fresh faced and innocent, he played with real skill and ease. I remember backstage, the girls in Copenhagen were especially enamoured of him. His playing added a harder edge to our live shows.

Just before recording LUSTRA, we finally sacked our original manager, after years of incompetence. For a while there had been no-one at the helm to look after us as our manager had been suffering continual illness but refused to let anyone else take care of things. The only thing we did miss was how close we all felt in the first years of the band’s existence. Incompetent or not, we were never to capture that united feeling with any future management. Serendipity mutated into a loss of innocence, hollowing out the joy of being in a band.

We played the UK and European festival circuit that summer. Our live performances had moved into a heavier sound, which was a natural progression for us with LUSTRA. It was released in November 1997. It did not sell the amount Sony had been expecting, nowhere near, in truth. The Britpop wave had started to collapse. Very quickly, the brakes were put on with an audible and painful shriek of the end of an era. We were almost numb, though half expecting it. We took it to Sony, before they took it to us, had a meeting with Rob Stringer and said it was time to leave. It was like handing in your resignation before you get sacked in order to say you chose to go. Rob eventually was head hunted to go to Sony’s New York office and very quickly, everyone we had worked with seemed to melt away. Most of the friendships that had been cultivated became tenuous almost immediately. In our naivety, we felt hurt, misinterpreting them for real friendships.

One drunken evening, a few months before the dawning of the millennium, Glenn, Andy and I, talking about how we’d like to acknowledge the big 2000, merged our desires into “listening to Hendrix’s Purple Haze, while looking out at Everest …” Glenn took hold of the insanity and booked three tickets to go trekking in Nepal. Our only training was one walk around Richmond Park, which ended up in the pub, inevitably with those two. Still, we went. We were lucky to be alive as the tiny airplane belonging to a Yeti Airlines, which had flown us out to the makeshift runway, suffered a fatal crash on the way back to Katmandu.

On New Year’s Eve, the three of us took our places in the circle dance of the local Sherpas, tanked up on home brew, high up in the Khumjung region of the Himalayas in Nepal. Outside, the inky night sky dazzled with its be-jewelled display of countless stars. It was surreal in its majesty and it was far, far away from London and its music scene.

(As I recall).  Sonya Aurora Madan   – June 2015 – London

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