journal for plague lovers - lyrics book

[andy]

in the jfpl book did richie or 'the band' blank out the lines/words with a marker?

Anyone know anything of those lyrics - I have heard the band blanked them out as they were disturbing - anyone know if this is correct and heard anything about what they are supposed to say? on the page next to JCEQT there is a piece where the who page is hard to read and largew sections are blanked out...

[Mr Richey]

To my knowledge, nobody from the band has ever provided an official explanation as to why certain segments of the lyrics have been blacked out. So anything you may or may not have heard is probably just rumour.

[pingu]

the fact that no-one's said anything concrete would look like Richey had done the editing on his notes before giving them to the band - but again, that's just surmising on my part.

edit: but considering the chorus of the first song on the album contains the line 'bruises on my hands from digging my nails out', how much more disturbing could the blacked out bits have been?!

[raven]

http://www.repeatfanzine.co.uk/inter...ire%20jfpl.htm

[less than zero]

I've always thought that as the playlist in the booklet has been edited with only the tracks that made the final album remaining, that it was probably the band that did the editing.

[Librarian On Fire]

I recently watched a doco on YouTube with the band and the making of JFPL. I think the doco was titled Shadows and Words. On there you could see the manuscript for the lovely "William's Last Words". There was a lot that did not make it to the song. It was very heavily edited. The song probably reads better this way.

Any one smart enough could go and grab a screen shot of the manuscript if they wanted.

I wonder what will happen to the physcial copy of the journal. It almost rightfully deserves to be in the British Library.

[HunkyDory]

In most interviews James and Nicky said that there wasn't much left of Richey's lyrics, only some haikus, after using those of the JFPL songs. But some days ago someone on FD posted an interview from that era which I've never seen before and James states that there were some lyrics which were too dark to be used for the songs. So maybe there are more lyrics left than we assumed.
Here's the link if you haven't watched it yet http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM3IzGkGUwU. Around 5:45 he talks about it.

I've always wondered how the lyrics of "Adolescence Speech" (or something like that, can't look it up at the moment) which Richey mentioned in his introductory lines of his booklet looked like; He obviously thought that these lyrics (and the "All is Vanity" ones) were especially worth mentioning. So they probably contained some of the dark/destructive lines since they were never used.

Edit: Sorry, it's "Infancy Speech"

[Glyn]

Yeah its strange that they left in the mention to infancy speech when the booklet is full of blackouts. Considering that all is vanity is the more concise of the lyrics (with minimal editing required from memory) Richey clearly knew what lyrics would work.
It could be completely wide of the mark but I'd always assumed that Elvis impersonator,Kevin Carter,girl who wanted to be God &small black flowers were included in the 'opulence' folder. Pure conjecture but one or two could be the blanked out song titles ? Just on a related note it is interesting to see the structural similarities (ie cut&paste!) between Kevin Carter and Marlon JD. Always thought small black flowers and VSEC were on very similar lines too, hardly a shock though I guess (songs written at similar time being similar).
A good question too is why bag lady isn't there ? The title is mentioned but no lyrics . I'm sure they mentioned that its based on someone Richey met in care so perhaps it was too personal ? More boring answer could be that it was a late addition to the album after the artwork was completed maybe ?