Love Your Enemies

Microdisney. One of my favorite bands of all time, they had a song called Love Your Enemies.

Microdisney's message was always delivered in an indelible sarcasm with much British (errr.... Irish) sensibilities. It didn't always make sense to an ernest lad from Van Nuys, CA, but I was attracted by their album "We Hate You South African Bastards", and their other album "Everybody Is Fantastic". They re-released the "...South African Bastards" record on CD, changing the title to "Love Your Enemies".

Microdisney were Irish, which may or may not be relevant.

I have no idea where their name Microdisney came from. After

much googling I turned up nothing. I doubt they were a big enough blip on the radar for the Disney™ corp to come after them, and had they, I'm sure Cathal Coughlan and Sean O'Hagan (The Lennon/McCartney of Microdisney) would have had something to say, as they often did, about corporate greed and socio-political unrest. Cathal went on to form the band Fatima

Mansions (check their fierce tracks Only Losers Take The Bus and feel the whoop-ass in their politically difficult to pronounce Blues For Ceausescu) and Sean formed the High Llamas. Pretty obscure stuff for sure, but despite Microdisney releasing 4 or 5 albums it's the 2 pictured that are a permanent and necessary pat of my music collection. Later songs like Town to Town, Horse Overboard, Singer's Hampstead Home, Give Me All Your Clothes and Birthday Girl were all great- if not blatantly uncommercial - especially in the mid to late 80s when they were their most productive - and radio was exploding with synthesizer-based bands like Human League, Simple Minds and Thompson Twins. Microdisney weren't anti-synth, but they were pro-song writing and made their noise by any means necessary often playing the inside of a piano, an off-key guitar or an old drum machine. But their lyrics were what attracyed me. High And Dry features the opening lines : "Why'd you have to leave me for some Albanian gambler on the Beirut train?/When I'd finished laughing, /I celebrated with a glass of hate. /You got dreams and I've got demons."

Love Your Enemies :

Why don’t you love your enemies?

Why don’t you give them everything?

Why don’t you get down on your knees?

Adore your enemies

Idiots

Fuck em all

Only fools

Fucking idiots

Fucking idiots

Fucking

All my friends – I mean you

All my friends – God afraid

And they dance in the streets in the hot afternoons

And they spat at our backs and they kicked us away

To live in the dark, live in the park

This is the reason why we were born

And his head is aching

Why don’t you put your eyes up? And his God is waiting

Why don’t you put the light up?

Give them everything

Give them everything

Give them everything

Give them everything

And this is all I’ll ever be

And this is all

I’ll ever be

We lay in your bed in the hot afternoons

And we argued about how little money we had

Life in the dark

Life in the cold

This is the reason why we were born

Our own language

Our own lot

Our own fears

And our own Gods

Our freedom and the right to do

As we please with the likes of you

And I try to laugh at them

And they smack me on the face

And they push us through the fields

Saying “Love your enemies”

Give them everything

Give them everything

It’s too late –

Ha Ha

God begins to call

And this is all we’ll ever be

And this is all they’ll ever be

The elder upstands and the rebellion is well

And it fills them with joy just to see us this way

And taking each step just to take the next breath

And taking each breath just to take the next step

The sons going past as I swung from the trees

Take everything you own and make it into a neat pile

Set fire to it, burn it all

See what your love can do

Say “Oh look what my love did”

The power of love

The power of love

The power of love