The ten plus minute is an entire film treatment! The 4:25 contemporaneous edit might make a better song...
This clears the brief for the song up. It's an epic Desolation Row - with a tune this time - for the eighties, filled with cartoon gangsters, Alan Lomax bums, bottom of the rung chancers and a romanticised, weaponised melancholic tinge of hope, acceptance and brotherhood.
A shifting narrative told from various points of view, like an epistolary novel, but instead of letters, it's snatches of conversations from the end of bars and the backseats of busted cars. It's up to the listener to decide if the same character is speaking twice or if it is two or more people sharing a point of view. Or even if it's happening in the same time period. I fucking love it.
Too short at ten minutes for me, I wanna keep dancing to it even after it finishes. I even like Schrodinger's Strummer vocal, you're left listening hard, catching what might be glimpses of his voice through the passing telephone poles from the dirty window of the chugging locomotive that is the song. The melody is unstoppable.
IMCT: All I want is one more Strummer/Jones composition.
Also IMCT: Waaah, there's too much of it, I can't listen in a few sittings.
It's called discerning taste, fanboy! It's what separates us from the rabble.
"I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back in Whittier, they're not much bigger than two meters.'" - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft