Born in Flames (single)

Born in Flames / The Sword of God
Single by The Red Crayola
Released	July 25, 1980
Recorded
Studio
Label	Rough Trade
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Track listing

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Born in Flames"
2.	"The Sword of God"

Background

Rough Trade press release

"Born in Flames" is the title of a film made in the U.S.S.R. in 1929, Director Vladimir Korsh, Screenplay by Anatoly Volny. The film concerns the fight of the Red Army against the nationalists and the Germans during the civil war in Russia.

This song is programme music for a new film by Lizzie Borden about the enthusiastic amateurs of social change.

"The Sword of God" is about the nature of Logic..."In a Muslim story, a fallen champion saw a Crusader wielding against him a magic invincible sword bearing the name of God:

'Sword', he cried, 'Can you strike a true believer? Do you not know the name on your blade?'

'I know nothing but to strike straight', the sword replied.

'Strike then, in the name of God.'"

Peter Geach, "God And The Soul", London 1969, p. 85.

Image gallery

• 
  Rough Trade press release for Born in Flames
• 
  Poster for the 1920s Soviet film Born in Flames

Reviews

Smash Hits

August 21, 1980

This is 1980 lads, and time you grew up. Red Crayola are/is Mayo Thompson, a clever, witty American plus borrowed musicians who make spiky, nervously energetic left field music without being unduly arty in the process. The programme music for a film about "enthusiastic amateur of social change" (according to the press release), this takes a few plays to sink in while the brain sorts out the melody and the four creative parts--rather the usual pre-programmed arrangements--that go into making up the whole. Brain fodder father than dance music but melodic and enjoyable.

New West

September 22, 1980

The latest word on U.K. neo-revisionist-post-punk-avant-garde: Born in Flames, a Rough Trade press release says, is the title of a 1929 Soviet film about the struggle of the Red Army during the civil war of 1918-20. It's also the title of a new single by the Red Crayola, a group of moonlighting Londoners that includes recent Pere Ubu recruit Mayo Thompson (who headed the original Red Crayola in Houston during the psychedelic sixties) on guitar, Gina Birch of the Raincoats on bass, Epic Soundtracks of the just disbanded Swell Maps on drums and the brilliant Lora Logic of Essential Logic on saxophone. Lora takes the lead vocal here, twisting lyrics that depict a fantasy of the-U.S.A.-after-the-revolution into a pattern in which a lust for abstraction battles random images of class war, capitalist iniquity, solidarity and political hedonism. With words by Art & Language, a collective of socialist artists, the song is insufferably Stalinist and naive on a lyric sheet; on record it's the most surprising 45 I've heard this summer. And there is one truly haunting couplet: "Of America's mysteries/None remain."