Every time I play this song it takes me right back to Les Cousins and that day in 1969 when Roy had gathered the faithful to make a live recording for the album. I can still feel the nervousness and expectation as I sat at that little table and waited. I so wanted it to be perfect. I’m sure I was eaten up with nerves more than Roy was – although he did break a string in the course of the performance due to hitting the guitar too hard.
The whole gig was recorded and later came out as Live At Les Cousins. A great slab of history.
He wanted a fiery live version for the album. As it turned out Roy wasn’t satisfied with what had come out of the gig.
I Hate The White Man
Just as ‘McGoohan’s Blues’ is the centre-piece to Folkjokeopus, ‘I Hate The White Man’ is the guts of Flat Baroque And Berserk. Like ‘McGoohan’s Blues’ it is an extremely powerful statement of a song.
Roy was very much aware that it had been hard to generate the required passion for ‘McGoohan’s Blues’ when he recorded in an empty studio. He wanted the ‘White Man’ to be a live recording in front of his own audience and what better place than Les Cousins, the small intimate club where he had started out that became his second home. Amazingly EMI agreed and their mobile recording studio was set up in the club. That is incredible because we now have a recording of the entire show – which later surfaced as Live At Les Cousins.
The decision to leave the spoken preamble on the record was a dubious one. Roy always likes to talk about the lyrics and explain the ideas within his songs. He wants the inherent meaning to be understood but once you have listened to the introduction a few times it begins to pale. Roy knew that with a title like ‘I Hate The White Man’ it would be easy to mistake what the song was about and he felt the lyrics required explanation. Perhaps that was best kept for the liner notes or the live album?
This song features Roy and his guitar without any other backing yet he creates a full and complex piece of music. Roy has reverted to normal tuning. The chords are powerful and the voice is clear and pure. As the piece progresses passion builds and builds until it is storming along with Roy hitting those strings with real venom.
The poem has nothing to do with skin colour. It is all about an attitude. It concerns the empty culture, hypocrisy and arrogance of western society with its violence, avarice and inherent racism. Roy detests the destructive nature of western values. His central premise is that this so-called civilisation took away a natural hunter-gatherer way of life and replaced it with concrete and shackles.
‘The land of look and see’ refers to America and Native Americans prior to the arrival of the Europeans.
Roy is hankering after a simpler life away from this plastic society of drunkenness, guns, teargas and unfulfilling lifestyle. His fury is aimed at the establishment and the lust for power and wealth that not only creates war, enslaving us and taking away our freedoms, but destroys the planet in the process.
This ‘attitude’ is not confined to those with white skin. There are plenty of our brown, yellow and black skinned fellow human beings who worship the same gods of arrogance and greed, whose media propaganda feed the same lies and maintain the same fallacies.
Roy envisions a tragic nuclear finale to our violent culture which in the face of the evidence from history will inevitably perish. At the end of the song ‘the shooting star has summoned death’s dark angel from his night’.
Phew!! Has there ever been a more powerful song filled with such meaning?
A four or five minute version of this song could have been a hard-hitting single! It should have been Roy’s ‘Working Class Hero’. It’s a far better song than Lennon’s but with a very similar arrangement and chords. His first opportunity missed I think.