Nemesis

Barry posted his own explanation in 2012:

The seed idea was simply the notion that one could make a deliberate moral choice to do evil rather than good (you may recall the scene where Colonel Kurtz talks about the Viet Cong soldiers hacking off the arms of the Vietnamese children who had been innoculated by the Americans: 'I thought, my God, the genius of that... understand that these men were not monsters... they had wives, families, they fought with their hearts... yet they had the strength... the strength to do that'.) In Conrad's book it's more about embracing the savage immorality of Nature: 'the horror, the horror'.

It was a thought experiment and one that chimed with a number of other cultural moments: Eve eating the apple of course ('very little fruit is forbidden'), the Decadent movement of the late 19th century -- doing the Wrong Thing on purpose, essentially -- and the earlier Decadence of Imperial Rome. And -and! - the mighty Nemesis the Warlock from the 2000AD comic -an upright-standing deerlike alien with a nose like a harpoon.

Nemesis the Arch Deviant whose weirdness was persecuted by the fascist Torquemada ('be pure, be vigilant, behave!') but whose own morality was highly ambivalent. I decided to conflate the Greek goddess of cosmic retribution with him because, let's face it, while she embodies an important principle, she doesn't have a nose like a harpoon.

'Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals' - I was imagining a procession of the primal and the gigantic; innocently terrible. All clumsily, heroically, marching into town along with the damaged and vengeful. To a good shoutalong tune which might, in a paralell, happier universe, be sung at football matches.

The three verses are divided neatly, satisfyingly into:

1: The Theory, our hero (me -hah!) is imagined as a mediaeval scholar gone to the bad -- we referenced the Durer woodcut 'Saint Jerome in his Study' as an image of the theological and contemplative life in which our man makes the decision to go for evil (as he demonstrates by spilling ink over the 'good' side of the God versus the Devil parchment and snuffing out the candle). The controls are set.

2: The Badness in action. We're obviously going for some Greek pagan/Roman decadence filtered through the painters Titian ('Bacchus and Ariadne', particularly) Boronzino and Rubens. I like very much the unplanned moment as the Rubenesque lady delivers the 'poison kiss' to the little boy. There's a lovely (or weird and sick, your choice) sense of dubious initiation which their faces probably accidentally, but beautifully -- register ('naughty aunty, how I would look forward to her visits..').

3: Consequences. We went for a green, decaying feel through lighting and make up and referenced Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast where the Babylonian king gets his commuppence from Yahweh for tooling around with His People (the 'writing on the wall').

The choruses were mock heroic in the style of dodgy filmmaker Leni Riefensthal (who you may remember from such engaging romps as 'Triumph of the Will' and 'Victory of Faith'). All swirling clouds and tracking. That and a drug fuelled amdram Gilbert and Sullivan production.

Then, of course, Nemesis arrives at the end to consume me and Carl's depraved little set up in his big krill-sifting choppers.

Be warned, kids.