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Thursday's Leper

from Running Late by The Gatekeepers

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about

The lyrics are a good example of how a nineteen year old with literary pretensions thinks. To tell the life story of a social outcast I had him survive a kind of mass abortion in the first verse, be boorishly self-pitying in the second, cast out even by time in the middle 8 and then denied even private vanity in the third verse. I didn't think of myself that way and even those kids who had been scapegoats at school didn't have this bad a time of it. But if you think you're a Great Australian Novelist in development while still in your teens you'll probably come up with something like this as an "exercise".

This arrangement is pretty much identical to the original recording from '82 save for an extra janglyjingly guitar. Intentional irony aside, the bouncy rock points quite a jolly finger at the victim rather than attempting empathy. I'd never write a song like this now.

I was fascinated by the subtleties of social coercion and how a little visible difference in looks, lifestyle or behaviour could fuel enormous hatred. If you were young in the early 80s and had short hair and dressed like an opshop suitrack you attracted all manner of bullshit. No real damage and no reason to resent it as it had been my choice to be so easily identifiable. Anyway, this 'un is more generally about personal scapegoating. The title is a modification of the rhyme about days of the week:

Monday's child is fair of face
Tuesday's child is full of grace
Wednesday's child is full of woe
Thursday's child has far to go
Friday's child is loving and giving
Saturday's child must work for a living
And the child born on the sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe and happy and gay

I'm not going to make the obligatory joke about the word gay meaning happy then as it didn't.

Thursday's child posed a problem for me as I didn't know if by far to go they meant that the child was handicapped or gifted or just travelled far. It annoyed me as I'd tried to work out the day of the week I'd been born on - this minus seven, and figuring the leap years, bahdump badumpdabump - and got Thursday. I was out by one, so I really ought to be full of woe.

Also, I have always considered astrology to be nonsense but it still comes up. One ex of mine called a truce on the subject but wanted to plot me on the great immutable (but moving) matrix o' the stars. I complied short of the time of day I was born. I still have no idea nor any concern about this information but she refused to believe it and thought I was holding out.

Anyway ...

Oh, this is one of those songs I wrote where I put a million chords into the middle 8 as that's what clever people do. It was murder to reconstruct it from the cruddy first recording (1982, first 4-track stuff).

credits

from Running Late, released February 27, 2013
Words and music: Peter Jetnikoff 1982

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The Gatekeepers Melbourne, Australia

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