home back to follow	The Seven Signs Of Madness Clive Nolan - January 2005
	Clive explains the themes of the ‘conceptual’ new album Pepper’s Ghost. An album which deals with the themes of perception, wrong interpretation and insanity. Seven separate yet linked songs about the seven aspects of madness. What are those seven aspects of madness the songs are about? Bedlam Fayre is the more traditional insanity. The things that we see in the Victorian pictures. Bedlam was a lunatic asylum since the early fifteenth century. People used to pay money to go there and watch the mad people. It was entertainment but it was a horrible place. People where tortured and just left to rot. I took it one step further. Maybe we’re all a bit mad. Maybe the whole place is full of lunatics. The idea behind Bedlam Fayre wasn’t a fairground but a market full of mad people. Perhaps it was an entertainment for others to watch the mad people or perhaps we are the mad people and the people inside are not. Smoke and Mirrors has more to do with fooling other people as to who you are and what you are.  In the dictionary it says about the phrase ‘smoke and mirrors’ that it’s ‘the use of misleading information to obscure or embellish the truth.’ I had to think of the war in Iraq. Anything like that. That’s the whole point. It’s about making people look in the wrong direction. The song isn’t any specific comment on the war in Iraq. The Shattered Room is about multiple personalities, the fight of different egos for the control over a human being. It refers to the same idea as the shattered mirror. When you smash a mirror you see lots of different faces. Shattered Room is a place where you may exist but where ever you are in the room, you’re somebody else. The Eyes Of Lara Moon is the idea of being sent mad perhaps by a vision that you can’t get out of your head. The power of someone to have visions but is unable to end them. This song is not very far away from Contagion, really. Tantalus is about the frustration of not quite being able to get somewhere or reach something; the insanity which is produced by the frustration that one just cannot have what one wants to have – so close and yet so far away. That song is based on a Greek myth. Tantalus is chained in water but he can’t drink. And there is fruit hanging from the trees but he can’t eat it. He is starving and dying from thirst but he never actually dies. He is constantly tantalized.  The song is about being stuck in a situation where you can almost taste victory or success, or food or whatever it is that you’re looking for. But you’re not able to have that. How do you become insane? Perhaps you’re misled; perhaps you believe something that is fault; perhaps you’re tantalized to the point of madness; perhaps you’re treated in a particular way. These songs are more about the journey to madness than the actual madness Purgatory Road deals with the syndrome of people who think they’re somebody else. Maybe they believe they’re Napoleon or that they’re immortal.  The purgatory is a catholic concept. How do you see the purgatory? I took the concept of the purgatory very loosely. Maybe life is purgatory. Maybe what happens here is a way that we’re paying for something else. That was the starting point for the song. It deals with this person who believes that he has to pay the world back for the sins of man ever since the first time he saw man cause a death or something like that. He’s not prepared to die until everything is being sorted out, which of course is impossible. It’s almost like the opposite of Jesus. Opera Fanatica is about taking adoration to an unnatural point. It deals with the extreme lengths that a fan can go to when it gets beyond funny. The song is about this theme that you’ve seen in many films: the crazy guy who moves into the flat next to you and you can’t get rid of him. The stalker is isn’t stalking from his perspective. For him, that fanatical thing is natural. Is the song based on a real life experience? There’s been some strange experiences which were an inspiration for the starting point of the song. But I’ve taken things a little further. Enthusiasm is great. Fans are fantastic. We do it for people who believe in what we do but there’s a natural line. Sometimes there are people who don’t understand what that line is. I can’t really give examples without making that person feel like he or she is being named. So it wouldn’t be fair. By: Niek Hermsen