The Visitor

And here it is, finally! The answers to the questions that we have been waiting for. As promised we had a long talk with Clive about the lyrics of The Visitor. And he came up with a lot of information, really a lot… see and judge for yourself!

One of the first questions that came into my mind after I’d read the lyrics a few times is, do you still believe in God? A lot of people told me they think The Visitor is about religion…
Ehm [smiles and thinks for a moment]… A lot of people tell me that a lot of what I write is about religion!

Is it?
Well, that depends on what you mean by religion. I have a lot of beliefs. I am not sure I can class myself as a Christian. I have a big sort of personal struggle with God, with the concept of what God is. And any kind of relationship I had with God has been a fairly angry one, just because of things that had happened to me in my life. I often find that the lyrics are the way I try to search for the kind of solutions to what I actually believe in. I suppose I believe in something. When you say ‘do you believe in God’, it usually means somewhat more than I’m being asked ‘am I a Christian?’, to which I couldn’t really say that I am. 

I don’t like any of the dogmatic religions available. I don’t like any kind of the ‘package deals’, never have done. I think people should find their own answers and I think it’s too easy when you’re fed with a set of solutions. With Christianity it’s easy: you get your cross, you get your Bible, it’s all there. It’s almost like having a t-shirt and a ticket to go down to the gig. In a way I suppose I’ve chosen to find out what I believe in the hard way. Unfortunately, it has not always been satisfactory, but it’s interesting.

The protagonist of The Visitor, who falls through the crack in the ice, does he still believe in God at the end?
[Thinks for a while] No. I don’t think he does. I don’t think he believes in God. I think he’s probably a bit like me: he may believe in something. He’s challenging faith; he’s out there on the ice, because he doesn’t really have any need to live anymore. And he’s challenging faith to say ‘I don’t care anymore, if I fall through the ice, so what!’. And faith decreases at that particular moment. It’s only after that moment that he starts to realise the need to survive. But that isn’t about God, that’s about himself. 

But intertwined with all of that, is probably a lot of what he believes in and what he’s searching for. From the Bible to the X-files, we’re all searching for the truth, and that’s what it’s all about.

So he’s challenging faith… Is he challenging the Visitor?
Well, I suppose the Visitor is challenging him. I think what the Visitor… certainly in the way I perceive it, the Visitor is forcing him to come to terms with the fact that there is something else out there, and that you’re never alone. There is something, whether it’ll be a Christian God or a Buddhist God or a whatever else God; I don’t think it matters. I mean, I’m a big believer that we probably all believe in different things, and they probably are kind of all the same things as well. I think it has more to do with how that affects what you do in your life probably. 

The only judges I’ve ever seen are human, not Gods. I think we do most of our own sort of damage and most of our own good things, so God is inside all of us, whatever that may be. 

And I think the Visitor is challenging our hero to some extent, rather than the other way around. And he fights it for a while. But when he’s facing these various personalities, he’s facing parts of himself, so ultimately he has no argument. That’s what I think anyway.

So the Visitor doesn’t have to be a real person, like for instance you and me?
The Visitor is definitely not a real person! I think that’s the one thing the Visitor is not. The Visitor could be a dream, he could be an alien, he could be God, but I don’t think the Visitor is a person, unless that person is the person himself.

Okay, so the Visitor doesn’t pull him out off the water then (literally)?
Well… he, the person perhaps doesn’t, but if the Visitor is, well… many miracles have happened without necessarily having a satisfactory explanation. If the Visitor is God, it will be the easiest thing in the world for him to pull him out of the water. If the Visitor is a ghost, it might still be possible, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the Visitor that pulls him out off the water, maybe it’s his own need to survive. Maybe he didn’t get pulled out of the water…

Maybe he didn’t fall into the water…
Maybe he didn’t fall into the water, that’s entirely possible. There have certainly been quite a few interesting films, which have taken that idea, where something has happened and you follow that path of what the results of that action were, only to find out at the other end that that action has never happened. ‘The Devils Advocate’ was a recent film example of that, actually mere coincidence.

What about the X-files? I had to think about the X-files when I’d heard the album a few times…
I’m a big X-files fan and a lot of the things that they address, a lot of these conspiracy theories, that’s something John [Mitchell – eds.] and me are really into. We enjoy discussing those. And some of the other things, some of the mysteries… There has got to be something more to life than what we see. I’m not saying that because I fear death particularly, I just think there has. I mean, we’re so small and insignificant in the greater scheme of things, that there has got to be something more going on out there. I think it’s fascinating to wonder what it might be.

So there are some unexplained things on The Visitor, too?
I think there’s a lot of unexplained things. When I was writing the lyrics I certainly made a point of asking questions and not necessarily the ones that I had the answers to. Because life is like that, you know. You don’t get the 
answers to everything, so why should The Visitor be any different?

Is it the best thing you’ve ever written?
You mean lyrically…? Ehm, yeah, I think so, yeah. It was certainly the hardest thing I’ve ever written.

Why?
I dug a lot deeper into myself to write it. There’s an awful lot of me in there of which I hope nobody will ever work out. There’s only two albums that I’ve done that to and that’s the first Shadowland album and this one, to that extent. It’s a very personal album, but I’ve done it in such a way that it doesn’t have to be. I hope that it communicates something to a lot of people; it works on a lot of different levels. When I’m writing lyrics, I like to have kind of like codes and things like that. And there are a lot of little sort of tricks in there, which I sort of enjoyed for my personal benefit. One of the albums for example I wrote lyrics where the first letter of each line spelled another set of words down, stuff like that. I like to do things like that occasionally. It keeps me amused.

The word ‘immortality’ seems to appear a lot in your lyrics? Do you think about that a lot?
Yeah, well, I’d like to achieve immortality by not dying, I think would be good. Yes, I do think about that. One of my sort of ‘syndromes’ if you want to call it that, is the fact that I don’t have enough time to do what I want to do. And I think if I could be given a couple of a hundred years or so, then that might help. But then, if I had a couple of a hundred years, I would probably want more. So yeah, I’m quite interested in the idea of living forever.

Then there are some lines in the lyrics songs that I don’t fully understand. To start with A Crack In The Ice: Who defies who?
I think our hero is defying God or fate or whatever. ‘I’m just angry at the world, I’m just angry at the universe, fuck all of you, I don’t care what happens’. 
Basically, what it means is ‘if you want to kill me, kill me, I don’t care.’ All the lyrics are written from the hero’s point of view or written through the mouth of the Visitor. And even the ones written through the mouth of the Visitor are still in a certain way, written through his own mouth as well.

Then there is the line ‘wonder if I could have helped’… Who wanted to help whom?
I wonder if I could have… I can’t remember exactly where it is, but… As the album progresses, he (the hero) asks himself a lot more questions. As it starts off he’s relating to these personalities and gradually he becomes more self-aware. They all become one. So gradually he starts asking, instead of talking to, I don’t know, the clown for example, he is actually talking to himself and he knows it. So it’s developing at least that’s what I think.

And then about The Hanging Tree, which is my favourite song and it’s a lot of people’s favourite song, by the way…
That’s because it’s the longest song…

No, I don’t think so. I think it’s because it’s a very emotional song. But the man and the boy in the song, who are they?
It’s a very emotional song to me, too. It’s something from my childhood, where the basic idea came from. The hero arrives in this kind of barren wasteland, to experience the things that he’s experiencing; it’s almost like having a taste of the after life without being dead, a near death experience. I just wanted to have a very strong image. Something that would really kind of make this place have a personality.

And I remember when I was a child living in a particular village in England, there was this field opposite and there was this big, big, big, well it seemed that way at the time, big old tree that had been struck by lightning, and it was dead. I think it was an elm. They all died in England; Dutch elm disease in fact, so I think it was your fault! 

Anyway, it was enormous. I used to go sneak across to this field, even when I was young. I probably wasn’t allowed to go there, but this tree seems to have a life of its own. It was sort of dead and it was like this enormous monster. I used to wonder what he could see, ‘cause my mum told me that this tree was probably like say 400 years old. So when this tree was young, Dick Turpin was robbing people and before that kings were having their head chopped off. And I just had this idea about this history that this tree would have seen. I used to believe that the tree had a kind of malevolence about it as well, where the tree actually wanted to take control of certain situations. On the other side, I felt the tree was a protective thing. Sometimes when I got into trouble, I used to go and run to this tree. 

I suppose the man and the boy are probably me. It’s the fact that the tree has seen the growth of man, from boy to man. I went back to this field with this tree and it’s still there, 20 years later. It’s still enormous and dead. Then I thought any farmer would have knocked it down or cut it down and I just remembered having this very strong feeling that I could see myself when I was a child with this tree. That’s the reason I started with the lyric and obviously it develops from there to be something more.

And the man and the boy, they are the hero. The tree represents something that has been watching him from the moment he was born and will watch him till the moment he dies. I chose the tree as the image to do that. Does that make sense?

Absolutely! Turning to In The Blink Of An Eye: ‘Why should all the wise survive’, doesn’t remind me of the thief at all. What do those lines mean?
The reason I started like that, if I remember rightly was that, my thief, my image of the thief was… I made him a loveable rogue, but you’re not a rogue unless there is some spirit of bad in you somewhere. A good example might be from Charles Dickens with Oliver [Twist – ed.]. The man who is in charge of all the boys is called Fagin. In all our kind of representations of Fagin, he is always this rather loveable rogue. Fagin, he leads the children in the music door, he is entertaining. He’s got a twinkle in the eye, he’s naughty, but nice. But that wasn’t really true. He was utilising a lot of young children, who had nowhere else to go, nothing better to do. He was making money, he was exploiting. He was quite evil in his own way. He had his own set of morals, if you like. But he felt that the world owed him something. He felt that his situation was such that the world owed him. 

The song opens with those questions because the thief believes that things are not fair and on that basis he has a right to do what he does. So it’s the part of the hero saying ‘I want this’ and ‘I want that’ and ‘I have a right to it’. At that stage in the album, our hero is seeing someone else tell him that. But what he is about to realise is that these words are being thrown back at him. A good example, again, is Charles Dickens, Christmas Carol. One of the things Scrooge said before he had his three ghostly experiences… some people say ‘but these children are dying, could you not give to charity’. And then he says ‘no, no, let them die, that will decrease the surplus population’. And then later on, when he starts to discover that these children do die, one of the ghosts turns back to him and says ‘oh, well, that’s okay, that will decrease the surplus population’. And he has this words thrown right back in his face. 

That’s what’s gradually happening. These statements that these characters are making, they are saying to him ‘well, this is what you think, this is what you’ve been saying mate, this is what you feel deep down inside.’ Even the priest with the sexual perversion, that is implied in the lyric, that’s in there as well. That’s inside of him, something that he has been trying to keep… well, you know. But the reason that it has been going wrong with him is he has not accepted who he is. And he’s like so many human beings that end up in this kind of state. They aren’t actually looking inside, they spent all their time looking outside, looking for some kind of solution to walk up and solve things for them.

And in the end he has learnt a lot…!
I think he has learnt an immense amount… I did!! I think everybody should do that, but the thing is people are often very scared to realise… People like to think about their good points. People are never very keen to embrace their bad points. But there is no one who is pure, no one, in any way, whatsoever. There’s going to be a little bit of the thief, a little bit of the vampire, a little bit of... of a lot of other people as well.

Last question. Who is dying? The hero, the Visitor, the child…?
Well, I think that has to be left to the people to decide. I’ve given you a lot of answers that were really my starting point when I wrote it. They are not necessarily the answers anyone else in the band will give you. I’m very pleased with the structured ambiguity of these words. And I think I’ve written a set of lyrics if anything, that mean a lot of things. And that’s actually the best thing about it. The fact that people actually say ‘no, no, he died’, or ‘no, he survived’, that’s exactly what I wanted. And even the things I’ve told you the answers to, there are a lot of other possibilities. I think it’s good to have the questions. I personally have an opinion, but… I’m a Hollywood fan, so I would go for a positive ending. But that isn’t necessarily the answer.

Well, that was it. The answers to the questions that a lot of us have been waiting for. And there are still quite a few questions left. However, as Clive said, it might be nice to leave some unanswered!

By: Natasja Gravendaal