Artwork: Andreas Teichmann
‘Prince Of Denmark’
The Story Of The Song
A letter from Musketeer…
Backstory
Well I’ll be the first to admit that I probably listened to a bit too much Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds after writing this song. But let me tell you a little more about the track and how it came about to be in the final studio recording.
This song came about fairly comfortably from memory. I had sat down with my guitar and was playing around with various tunings, I was looking for a song to follow on from the lead track from the new EP, ‘The North Sea’. In the song the character catches a mermaid and starts to feel guilty about disturbing the deep. I imagined the character returning to dry land, and wandering around feeling even more guilty, almost as if the character felt like they had a curse over their head.
I don’t know how it came to be, but somehow several things had lined up at the moment of putting pen to paper, and fingers to chords.
The first thing was, that I hadn’t read Hamlet yet. It had been lingering on my to-read list for a very long time.
The second was that I had just just got back from a little visit from Scandinavia, I had been up in Sweden visiting my friends. I had played a show or two and wandered about the snowscapes, and then I came tumbling down to Copenhagen, where I was meeting my brother who had flown in from Australia.
We saw various things together in Copenhagen. The viking museum and its various runes and trinkets, even a well preserved longship. We visited the royal palace, the horses pranced around the courtyard. We stared into some very expensive restaurants, and instead drank glüg to keep us warm. We also did a little boat tour on the murky canals and learnt that beer was drunk instead of water in the sixteen hundreds because the H2O was mixed with sewage. Central to the song was when I bumped into a colleague in the main shopping square. He was busking in 1 degrees like a madman. He handed me the guitar to draw a few people in. Alas, after a few songs I couldn’t feel my fingers, and the crowd ignored me completely. I handed the guitar back to my friend Freddie.
Later, back in Hamburg, I remembered that on our boat trip, we had made a small stop at the Little Mermaid statue. A homage to the famous Danish writer, Hans Christian Anderson. This turned some cogs in my head, and I think I scoured some of his books online looking for some ideas. But nothing much came out of it, but perhaps that got me thinking about fairy tales, princes and princesses.
Somehow, after wandering down the ol’ google rabbit hole, I ended up browsing through Hamlet. Perhaps I was googling old danish royalty or something like that, and behold there was the title on my screen, ‘The Tragedy Of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’, to use a common phrase, it was like a bulb of light switching on in my head.
So after stealing a nice, Tallest Man On Earth tuning - EAC#F#BE - I wrote these words...
LYRICS
Swear,
Swear, Swear
There’s a mist against the sky
The blood gulls are calling out to you
A shrill wind kicks against your coattails
And sends shivers down your spine
They say it’s never been this cold in Copenhagen
And all the bars are crankin’ heat
The word is that you sucked your lover dry
They found a body in a gruesome peat
All a-wide eyed and filled with worms
Oh it’s never been this cold in Copenhagen…
-
Now out beyond the stacks
Where the churchyards yawn and breathe hell
The priests cross themselves; head, chest, and shoulders
As you take to the rotting smell
You say you gotta show those shrivelled souls the truth down in Copenhagen
So you hold up a skull toward the dull skies
In the crowded palace grounds
But all the tourists and their little sweet children
They are-a laughing out loud
Oh Its never been this cold in Copenhagen
And you’re bleeding out your ears
You’re bleeding out your eyes
They say you’re unstable
°
For those unfamiliar with the story. After being ordered to seek revenge by his father’s ghost, Hamlet pretends to be going mad in order to find out the truth of his father’s killer. He ostracises all those who love him in the process. In the end everybody dies. As usual.
I think one of the most haunting scenes which inspired the song was when the Queen shares a monologue to Ophelia’s brother regarding his sister’s death.
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
It reminded me of this painting by John Everett Millais.
