Like Leila Khaled Said

Version one recorded at BBC session, broadcast April 1981

Julian Cope - vocals, guitar

Troy Tate - guitar

Jeff Hammer - keyboards

Alfie Agius - bass

Gary Dwyer - drums

Version two recorded Autumn 1981, released on "Wilder" album, November 1981

Julian Cope - vocals, guitar, bass

Dave Balfe - keyboards

Troy Tate - guitar

Gary Dwyer - drums

Written by Julian Cope

At the start of 1981 nobody quite knew what to expect from the Teardrop Explodes. The critical reaction to "Kilimanjaro" hadn't been particularly favourable and "When I dream" hadn't stormed the charts either. Sure "Reward" was in the can and ready for release but the four piece unit which had recorded it in November 1980 had imploded, leaving only Cope and Dwyer together. A new lineup had to be created to support the single and whatever else may happen in the future. Also with Balfe and Gill gone, the songwriting would now be down to Cope and Cope alone.  Finally he had control of the band - could he (ahem) cope?

First recruit for the band was guitarist Troy Tate. Bill Drummond had been pushing Tate's name forward as a replacement for Gill as soon as Gill had left the band. Tate was a little older than the rest of the band and had some experience playing with the band Shake. He rehearsed with the band while Balfe was still a member, and fitted in well. But Cope was determined to oust Balfe - despite protests from Drummond and Tate - so Balfe was sacked before Christmas 1980. Cope truly took control now - stating his intention that the band needed not only a new keyboard player but also a bass player, previously Cope's role. Cope would take centre stage as the singer. 

The auditions were something new for Cope. Any previous change in the line up of the band had come from the pool of talent around Liverpool. Now two crucial members of the band were to be chosen from anyone who turned up to the audition. Cope and Dwyer took some acid, Tate had a pile of cans of alcohol and off they went, in a rehearsal studio in London, playing new songs which gave away nothing about the band. Cope wanted to see how they handled something not specifically based on the Teardrops' sound, as it was. We will reach the song they played in one of the next blog posts and it was quite different indeed. There were many musicians who came along to the audition, one of whom was Rolo McGinty, later of the Woodentops. Even though he didn't get the job, he stayed in contact with Tate who had him play on his solo material in the future. After ditching auditionees for the offence of having unsuitable hair or a strong scent of cologne, the increasingly spaced out Teardrop members picked Alfie Agius on bass and Jeff Hammer on keyboards. They were about to enter a whirlwind.

While the new members of the band settled in, they watched "Reward" slowly climb the charts, a single only two members of the current band had played on. An American tour was set up for March 1981 and Cope used the downtime of late Winter 81 to compose new songs for a forthcoming new album which he titled "The Great Dominions". Three of the new songs would make up the majority of the April 1981 BBC session for Richard Skinner.

"Like Leila Khaled Said" is one of the simplest songs in the Teardrop Explodes catalogue. It kicks off with Cope playing the opening riff on electric guitar - a churning move from Em to D with a little 7th added on each chord - before the whole band join him on the riff. Tate would add sparks of guitar harmonics or single note riffs or long sustaining guitar notes,  Hammer would pump out the fairground organ part, Agius thumping out the insistent bass part tied in with Dwyer's rock steady drums. After the verse the chorus is even simpler - an ascending chord change of C to D to Em before returning to the never ending verse riff while Cope songs the chorus vocal of the song title a few times. It's a mid tempo groove, the kind of song a band could riff on for hours, the kind of song you could lose yourself in - swirling, hypnotic, vaguely Middle Eastern with all those exotic seventh chords. It was introduced into the band's live set for the first date of the Spring US tour and was indeed the first song of the set on many nights. Cope would begin the song and lead the band into uncharted waters each night.

There are numerous recordings of "LLKS" from 1981, often listed on bootlegs at the time as "Now's your chance" due to the repetition of that line towards the end of the first verse. To be honest the lyrics were often in a state of flux during 1981, Cope only seemed to have the chorus line - the song's title - and the "Another ship" stanza in place, allowing himself to play around with the vocal, the phrasing of whatever words he came up with and making them fit into the song. It was in this state that the song was first recorded, for the "BBC Session" broadcast in April. The session version sounds slightly shambolic, the lyrics are still not quite there, the sound mix is rotten and the song fades out early. In truth it sounds like someone placed a microphone in front of a band rehearsal and pressed "record". This may not be far from the truth.

By the time the Teardrops were ready to record their second album in the early Autumn of 1981 they had lost Hammer and Agius and Dave Balfe was back on keyboards. The recorded version of "LLKS" shows a band who have regularly played the song and now have an arrangement for it. Little gestures throughout the song show this - the tinkling chimes at the start of the song, the hammered performance across all the instruments on the line "But the sad* is a very special thing", the slowly evolving layers of guitar lines which Tate weaves into the song, increasing over time to almost overwhelm the song as it fades out. (I often compare this to the end of "Off your face" by My Bloody Valentine which slowly fades to reveal a phalanx of guitar lines in the background). 

And then there's the words. For a start, who was Leila Khaled? To put it simply she was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and was the first woman to hijack a plane - in fact she did it twice, in 1969 and 1970. She became an icon for the Palestinian freedom movement and is still active in that complicated arena. (See her Wiki page here) Cope has mentioned her in a few interviews, saying this is a love song to her, and he has also mentioned her elsewhere in his extensive catalogue. Quite how this works out as a love song to her... Well I'm not convinced, shall we say? Anyway, the words are your typical Cope acid drenched pop art images, but still startling - the opening stanza is amazing. 

"You can smother me with kisses

You can smother me with dreams

You can always be the mistress of my schemes"

Ok, maybe it is a love song. 

I've always seen the second verse as a slight dig at other members of the Liverpool scene - "trying hard to get excited for your brand new name". There's also some fun alliteration within the reference to potato crisps and the artist Christo. Christo wraps things, did he wrap the crisps? The third verse is almost brutal, with the distorted "Fit for a pig" in the middle of it. Recording the song finalised the lyrics, so there was no more room for exploring and improvising the words, which is a shame. What's interesting is that there's a verse on the "Wilder" lyric sheet - "Ben Battle was a soldier bold..." - which was frequently sung during live shows in 1981. Cope must have had some affection for this verse even if he didn't record it.

The song was played very frequently during 1981, both on the two US tours and the British tour in the summer. This is how it gained the name "Now's your chance" on so many bootlegs. As I've already pointed out the lyrics were interchangeable most of the time, as can be seen on the video recording from Nottingham in August 1981 above. Also notable that Jeff Hammer is singing an additional melody of "Another ship will find you" during the verses, this melody would be translated to a synth melody in the recorded song's introduction. The Club Zoo lineup would also play the song frequently live, using the "Wilder" arrangement and lyrics, including occasional harmony vocals on the chorus line and Tate playing extended guitar solos with what sounds like an Ebow (an electronic device which allows a guitarist to produce endlessly sustaining guitar notes). There's even a clip of the band playing the song (the studio recording from "Wilder") on a European TV show in early 1982. 

"Like Leila Khaled Said" is perfectly placed in the Teardrops catalogue, just as it is perfectly placed in the middle of side two of "Wilder". It simultaneously looks forward and backward. The simple descending music, the repeating keyboard line and slightly Arabic vibe reference back to songs like "Thief of Baghdad". It also brings in a new era for the band, the first new music of the year with new musicians and hints at a new style, with more synthesisers beside the organ of previous Teardrops music. It's position in "Wilder" is perfect too - as it has the more familiar Teardrop sound after the synthetic Walkerisms of "Tiny Children" and before the echoing melancholy of "And the fighting takes over". In a way, it's the most traditional song on the album, something stable and comforting for fans to cling to amongst music which was "wilder" than expected. A step forward, but not too far. There would be more new songs in this batch which would stretch the band further, and would be stretched to beyond breaking point. But for now this was a good confident start to 1981. 

* Note that on 1981 live performances of this song Cope sings "But the sound is a very special thing" which sort of makes a little more sense.