Jeremiah Blues, Pt. 1

Jeremiah Blues (Part 1) uses the guise of the Biblical cock Robin to churn some insouciant funk. Sting has long outed his love of Bertolt Brecht's caustic indictments against the status quo, and Jeremiah - a wise-assed lampoon - is a character study, providing him with a chance to invert the earnestness in 'When the World Is Running Down'. The global "big clock is ticking" here, just like in the Police tune, but Sting, his puss adorned with a gleeful smirk at the end of the world's mayhem, loves it to death.

[Sting]: "It's tongue in cheek, kind of an absurdist song really," he grins, "I've been called a Jeremiah with this whole ecology thing, so I decided to take a swipe at that stance, a side-long look at it. It's ambiguousness is nice; I didn't want to write songs about save the trees or don't kill the Lemmings. That's not art, it's propaganda."

Sting would rather feed his listeners ideas that they might not taste until later. Like Brecht? He laughs. "Well, there's a lot to learn from his work - I studied him in school and have generally learned a lot from that guy. But there's a lot of bullshit in his stuff, too. Information in songs is important obviously, but it shouldn't be perceived as boring lessons. Jeremiah has got a good groove going for it."

Sounds like a bad dream Sting might have had ... Lots of dream imagery ...

“Jeremiah Blues,” in turn, lambasted the corruption and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. The track included another Shakespearean reference in “something wicked this way comes,” for an elegantly dressed, violent, money-hungry world happily ticking down toward some form of apocalypse—a “midnight at noon.” (“And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day”—Amos 8:9.) Ironically, just a year after the release of the song, Pope John Paul II finally publicly admitted that his Church had been wrong in their Inquisition’s persecution of Galileo for his contrary-to-the-Bible suggestion that the earth was not the center of the universe. “A pope claimed that he’d been wrong in the past....”

[From Rock & Holy Rollers: The Spiritual Beliefs of Chart-Topping Rock Stars in Their Lives and Lyrics by Geoffrey D. Falk.]

It's a great song from Sting's best solo album. My favourite line:

'The government saved a dying planet When popular icons failed'

An ironic dig at Live Aid - which Sting performed at! The Soul Cages album song was released in 1991 but it still resonates today:

'Every place around the world it seemed the same Can't hear the rhythm for the drums Everybody wants to look the other way When something wicked this way comes'

If that's not the world right now, 30 years later, I don't know what is!