"Where Are They Now?" lyrics - THE TANGENT

[I prologue]

[II the losing game]

Caught in lights in the underpass
A guy who needs no name
Lights a cigarette and thinks back...
He lost the winning game.
The Range Rover is long gone now,
The folks he bought and sold
Are transitory commodities
When investors turn their eyes on gold

Everything that happened here,
Was clear right from the start
But like a bolt from the blue,
When the sit hits the fan,
The locusts that crawl from the greenbelts
Will take all they can

[III europe by ebay]

And Dave, who list his love
In the corner of a foreign field
Gave up and hit the kick start
Of his old Ebay machine,
Rode the roads of Europe
But found him home next door

Like a bolt from the blue,
Like a shot from above
When he sees her face taking the sunlight
He only feeels love

Like the tails of lost kites left,
Ensnared on the wires
They look at the beauty around them
As they fly much higher

Around the corner is a place
Where all lost souls come face to face
With what comes next and signposts to the story's end
One lost will to carry on
But one found love when all was gone
And all our hopes and fears are waiting there...

... there at the crossing of lines
Out beyond our ordinary view
We can't know the ending until we've been through
Can't find the future,
'Cos it finds you

[IV watershed]

[V and the kids grow up]

The night terrors flew away
And all the agony of growing pains,
A father's hand, and the lyrics to some song...
... Were not the key
Somewhere inside yourself,
All these fears came to nothing
You're the teacher now, my guide to what is out there!

We're ticking the years away
The story unfolds each day
We can't know what change will come
We're all on the run

The girl who stole the coat from C&A
Grew up in time to save me
To give me all the things that I'd elected to
Just go out and miss
For all the crimes that I'd commit
Which beat her tenfold
She's a doctor now...
... I was her first case

[VII earnest in the resthome]

They fished him from his bathtub, three days after he had a stroke,
They sent Earnest to a resthome for other old abandoned folks,
But I bet he told stories! He'd be better that a Top Gun film!
And told them how he made that bike work, and how he made the spare parts from a tin!

We never saw it
We never saw him take his final roll
But he flew out of that resthome in a spitfire
With his hands firmly on the controls

[VIII another earnest on the sorpe dam]

Up atop the only dam the squadron could not break
The guy who failed to blow it speaks on a voice that shakes
For the first time in these sixty years
He glimpses what he did...

Like a bolt from the blue,
Like a shot from above,
He talked with the folks from the valley below
- and found love!

It's like when people find God
(That's a claim I can't boast)
You don't know what the end of the story is
Until you come close