I was just listening to this song, which seems to be about some kind of relationship issues with lots of vague references to fascism and paranoia thrown in. I think I read somewhere that Romania’s Iron Guard (or somebody) wore green shirts - anybody know the significance? Also, I’m fascinated by these lines: Better cut off all identifying labels
Before they put you on the torture table
Because somewhere in the Quisling clinic
There’s a shorthand typist taking seconds over minutes
She’s listening in to the Venus line
She’s printing out names, I hope none of them are mone
Anybody know what a “Quisling clinic” is? I thought I remembered Quisling having something to do with a (British?) traitor, but I could be mistaken. And I have no idea what a Venus line is, or for that matter what it means for a shorthand typist to take seconds over minutes. Any clues?
Vidkun Quisling 1887-1945) was a Norwegian collaborator with the Nazis. I’m afraid I haven’t a clue as to the rest of it, though. Maybe there’s a site with a good FAQ somewhere?
I’m a huge Costello fan, but I haven’t the slightest idea what he’s on about in Green Shirt. A lot of the songs on Armed Forces seemed to be pretty obscure. You can find clues to some of the songs, including Green Shirt, here. Pipeliner and Celyn are on the right track in regards to the Quisling Clinic.
The Armed Forces album, which includes “Green Shirt,” is filled with metaphors linking breakdowns in personal relationships to torture, fascism, and repression. In fact, I think Elvis Costello said that the theme of Armed Forces was “emotional fascism.” He even considered releasing the album under that name, IIRC. Elvis Costello was very paranoid in the 1970s about the possibility of the resurgence of fascism in Great Britain. He wrote the song “Less than Zero” in protest after watching a TV news show in which an interviewer lobbed softball questions at British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.
This strikes me as a fairly straightforward play on words: minute as a unit of time and as the record of a meeting.
This was not an uncommon or a wholly unreasonable fear in the late 70s and early 80s and it was a common theme in pop music at the time. The election of the right-wing Thatcher government and a resurgence in what the Americans call “hate groups” such as the British National Party and the National Front led a lot of people to suppose that the country was gripped by a massive swing to the political right (For example, in 1986, E J Hobsbawn, the Marxist historian, advised people to vote for the candidate best placed to unseat the Tory on the ground that Thatcher was a "quasi-fascist). After the event, this turns out to have been true in a way, just not the way that everybody thought at the time.
You learn something every day. Until I read this and then looked it up I had no idea that Mosely had lived so long. I knew he was a WWI veteran and that the height of his fame was in the 1930’s and I had always assumed he had died decades before 1980. And, with my American viewpoint, I had always assumed “Mr Oswald” in the song was Lee Oswald.
As long as we’re on the subject, did anybody else think the phrase “service stations” on Armed Forces (I forget the name of the song) meant “sexual positions”, or was that just some weird idea of my own?
A service station is a place alongside the motorway which sells food and petrol; you find them every thirty miles or so on most motorways. They have a reputation for poor-quality food and extortionate prices.