"Jason and the Argonauts" is a song by Andy Partridge. It appeared on the 1982 album English Settlement.
A live in-studio recording, for BBC, appeared on Drums and Wireless, later on the 1998 Transistor Blast box set.
Quotes[]
Andy: “Slightly out of chronological wack again, but we'll wave goodbye to early '82 with this wide screen, ocean going epic. If I think about all the songs I've written with a ships/sea/seaside connection, they really mount up. Perhaps I should have just followed my dad into the navy and stopped dreaming about it. All through our early career we were compared to the Talking Heads. I never saw the connection myself, but lazy journalists heard both bands' hiccuping vocalists and that was that. Trouble was, they were American art students from New York and were anointed ‘cool’. We were English council estate wasters from Swindon and anointed ‘naff’. The reason I bring them up is ‘Jason’ is the only song of ours that has anything in that might remotely sound like the Heads. It's the bit that goes, ‘And the more I travel, from the foam to the gravel, as the nets unravel...’ But that's it, and it's purely coincidental. Where's your lazy journalism now, when you need it?
“ps. Dear Mum, the long passage in the middle is not meant to be a guitar ‘solo’, but more of a hypnotic suggestion as to the expanse of the sea. You know, repetition, slight variation, big, broad, blue. It was even longer in the studio but we edited it down by a few nautical miles.”
Andy (on the BBC version): “You were supposed to get lost in the hypnosis of the middle section, in the mechanical repetitiveness of it. In this particular take though, we reined it in and didn't get lost.”
Lyrics[]
There may be no golden fleece,
But human riches I'll release
Oh, my head is spinning like the world and it's filled with beasts I've seen,
Let me put my bag down and I'll tell you it all right from the start,
Like the scarlet woman who would pick on the boys she thought were green,
And the two faced man who made a hobby of breaking his wife's heart
Seems the more I travel,
From the foam to gravel,
As the nets unravel,
All exotic fish I find like Jason and the Argonauts
There may be no golden fleece,
But human riches I'll release
I was in a land where men force women to hide their facial features,
And here in the west it's just the same but they're using make-up veils
I've seen acts of every shade of terrible crime from man-like creatures,
And I've had the breath of liars blowing me off course in my sails
Seems the more I travel,
From the foam to gravel,
As the nets unravel,
All exotic fish I find like Jason and the Argonauts
There may be no golden fleece,
But human riches I'll release
I have watched the manimals go by
Buying shoes, buying sweets, buying knives
I have watched the manimals and cried
Buying time, buying ends to other peoples lives
Jason and the Argonauts
There may be no golden fleece,
But human riches I'll release
Jason and the Argonauts
There may be no golden fleece,
But human riches I'll release