It was back in December 1967 that Tom Jones released ‘Delilah’, his now infamous song about murdering a fiancé after seeing a male shadow through her curtains one night and believing she was cheating on him.
“I felt the knife in my hand…and she laughed no more.”
Infamous because in woke Britain 2025 you can’t even countenance something like that happening. Even though it is happening all the time. It is VERBOTEN and if you subscribe to it in any way you are untermensch.
They used to play it before rugby matches in Cardiff but you wouldn’t hear a single bar out of it today and you certainly wouldn’t sing it on pain of being marched off to the local nick for a stern lecture and, if you’re unlucky, a spell at His Majesty’s pleasure.
Thus are songs judged by the times and the mores and that is why I’m glad to see The Fire Once Lost (led by songwriter Anders Duus) casting caution to the wind with a song that has a very similar theme.
Anyone expecting a violent Jones-like rendition will be disappointed though. It’s a gentle country piece which is his style.
He describes it as a murder-ballad waltz but it isn’t a murder on the dance floor, rather a sedate, detached matter-of-fact story about a man who takes his revenge on an unfaithful spouse and her lover. And in this version he buries the body.
And if I read the lyrics correctly, she was pregnant. With his child? No.
“Your love was glowing/and you’d started showing/but baby it wasn’t from me”.
The song is riddled with ingenious lines:
“Young when I met you/but soon I’ll forget you/ (alt – soon you’ll regret me) ’cause nobody knows where you are”
“Sleeping around…/now you sleep in the ground”
“Coming the dawn, baby, you will be gone/and he will be joining you too”.
So it’s a triple murder. A serial killer. Better call in the FBI.
And I make that US allusion for a purpose. This is very clever stuff. Had it been released in Nashville or Austin and played on Radio KXYZ or whatever it would have been syndicated across every independent radio station in the country by now, he’d have received an invitation to the Grand Ole Opry and he would be lined up already for the Country Music Awards (“representing that lil’ old European country that Don and the Boys relieved of Greenland”…)
Seriously. And the musical accompaniment of mainly acoustic guitar and mandolin is just so. As he says he prides himself on authenticity, there are no beats or samples added, and definitely no AI.
A man after my own heart. All power to his elbow.
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