Last night I saw it there, shining in the dark again,
The light that all men seem to fear,
They say that sailors were drowning in the bay,
And people kept away,
Waiting for the riches that a wreck would bring,
When the morning comes,
And on and on that light returns again,
To haunt the ones who would not hear the pain;
I took the old path down, climbing over rocks and stones,
The place I knew when I was young,
And in my fear I had to carry on,
Where no-one else had gone,
Looking in the heart of darkness from above,
To the man inside,
I took my chance and set off for the light,
And started the journey of my life;
And in the darkest hour that light was calling me,
Through the doorway to another world,
And there below me I saw all the days of my life,
Till the moment I stood on the shore,
Worlds away, this was my destiny,
To be back here in another time,
And all around me I saw the faces that I knew,
Reaching out, "there is nothing to fear,"
Worlds away,
Come with me;
Last night I saw it there, shining in the dark again,
The light that all men seem to fear;
Come with me, come with me, come with me...
"Now, this is one of my faves. It's another movie - I'd love somebody to do a movie to this one. It's about a boy in his teens, probably in a Cornish village around, say, the 18th Century. There's little cobbled streets and moonlight, and he's looking out of his small window at the top of the house on to the bay below. The water is peaceful and calm - and there's this light in the bay, twinkling and winking. The boy looks out at it, and local rumour and village hearsay has it that the light is not smugglers at all; it's a light that has come back to haunt the people of the village because one night, years ago, there was a terrible storm and a ship foundered on the rocks, just below the village - and the villagers decided not to go and help because they wanted the plunder the next day. They wanted all the salvage and the booty and the stuff that had been left over. So all night long they heard sailors drowning and calling for help - but none of them went down. This is the village that this young boy is growing up in, and as he looks from the window he sees the light, and he knows about the story, but he decides to go and see for himself. And that's why it's called Heart Of Darkness; the boy decides to confront his own fear and his own mortality. It's a very complex tale... my word! Anyway, he puts on his clothes and he climbs down an old track, rocks and stones, that he knew from when he was a younger boy. Of course, he's scared because of this story in the village, but he carries on anyway - and that's the point, just before he sets off on the journey towards the light, when he realises that he's confronting himself and that he's looking in his own heart of darkness. It's going to be a voyage into his own sub-conscious. The song is in two halves, and the first bit is quite slow, it's a ballady kind of thing, and the second half suddenly goes 'whooosh!' into a completely new area. And what the boy does then is he goes on this extraordinary journey once he's gone toward the light. The light then leads him off into... somewhere, into his sub-conscious or somewhere physical and other worldly. That's the key for the musical change; the journey. He sees, as he goes flying over the waves, that suddenly his life is opening up before him. All the days, right up to the moment that he stood on the shore waiting to leave, he suddenly sees his whole life flashing before him. And then, as he soars upwards, he starts to recognise faces of people that he knew who have died - and they're all beckoning to him saying 'There's nothing to fear. Come with me.' They're reaching out their hands to him, and he realised that he's actually at the point of death itself, but these people on the other side are saying 'It's OK. There's nothing to be frightened of.' And then he kind of whooshes back again, which is signalled in the song by a repeat of the first line; 'Last night I saw it there, shining in the dark again, the light that all men, seem to fear' but this time the difference is that he knows there's nothing to fear. Now what I'm trying to suggest here in this song, and it's something which has always interested me - incidentally, this is going to be a bloody long paragraph! - is the way that your mind can save you from a trauma. I'm quite certain that, when we have a car accident or something, your mind does save you from the trauma by blanking it out completely. It's like the brain is pre-programmed to look after itself. So I'm wondering along those lines in this song. It's like the out of body experiences that people have at the moment of death, they almost all describe the same thing; hovering above the bed and then going through a tunnel towards the light, and them seeing green fields and people that they know reaching for them. Of course, it's not going to be green fields for a man living in the desert - that's not his idea of paradise, it'll be his own idyll. I'm sure that out of body experiences around the world are all different but, nevertheless, they are all the same thing; going through the tunnel to light and then seeing people that you know. And I have a feeling that this could easily be about a thing in our brains which is pre-programmed to release this memory cell at the moment of death to prevent the trauma of ...nothingness. It's just a thought, a theory of mine."
The Getaway Gazette, March 1992
Albums
"Heart Of Darkness" appears on the following albums:
