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
/

Track listing

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

Background

Cover art

The front cover image is from a poster for the 1929 Soviet film В огне рождённая (Born in Flames) directed by Vladimir Korsh-Sablin. The image may have been taken from the 1974 book Revolutionary Soviet Film Posters by Mildred Constantine which contains the poster and describes the film in the same words as the press release for the single.

In 1982 the image appeared with other 'embarrassments' in "Index: The Studio at 3 Wesley Place showing the Position of ‘Embarrassments’". The image also appeared on a chair in their 2014 series Nobody Spoke.

The back cover is a painting by Rudolf Otto titled "Ready for Battle". This painting appears in Berthold Hinz' 1979 book Art in the Third Reich with the following description: "In an effort to legitimize the present war, wars and battles were dredged up from the past. The knight in Rudolf Otto's painting Ready for Battle, wearing armor borrowed from Hans Thoma and conveying not the faintest spark of life, is grotesque and bombastic."

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  Poster for Born in Flames
• 
  Ready for Battle by Rudolf Otto

Retrospectives

Lizzie Borden, 2016

Mayo Thompson (the leader of the band, Red Krayola) was involved with Art & Language, so I asked him to write a song. He wrote “Born in Flames.” I loved the title so much, I used it for the title of the film, which I was originally going to call “Les Guerilleres” after the book by Monique Wittig. [...] I didn’t want Born In Flames to be a boring art film, so I wanted a driving, rhythmic track to run simultaneously with speeches, so they didn’t have to be listened to. I hoped the words could work subliminally. The film is about a multiplicity of voices, so even if you hear some words it’s enough. The message, such as it is, is about the need for action.

Lora Logic, 2023

Just another Red Crayola day…

In true Mayo style, I was handed a lyric sheet 5 minutes before the bulbous red recording booth light went on!

Alone in the dark booth, confronted with strange, unusual words like “reptilian joint stock companies” and “set the vast conglomerates aflame”, I felt some comfort upon hearing Gina Birch’s deep pumping bass and Epic Soundtrack’s crisp, determined drum kit

When I landed on the runway about 4 minutes later, Geoff Travis greeted me through the mixing room window with a grinning smile

I’ll never know how this unexpected ditty, with it’s higher than helium notes was navigated

RIP Epic Soundtracks

Art & Language Speaking of ‘Nobody Spoke’, 2014

[...] The figure at the rear is from an illustration we made in 1978 for Lizzie Borden's film Born in Flames. It also became the cover design for an EP record called Born in Flames by Art & Language and the Red Crayola.

Reviews

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.

• 
  Rough Trade press release for Born in Flames

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.

Spex

September 1980

Ge

Epic Soundtracks (Swell Maps), Gina Birch (Raincoats), Laura Logic (Essential Logic) und Mayo Thompson (Neu-Pere Ubu) gehen hier daran, ironisch Geschichte und Gegenwart der Arbeiterbewegung darzulegen. Ob dies ein Thema für 'ne "Rock"-Platte sein kann oder soll, wollen wir gerne der weiteren Folge der Diskussion "Rock als Medium politischer Ideen?" (118. Folge) überlassen. Aber die Musik (zu einem Film) ist so eine Art ausgeschlafener Jazz-Funk und vermag eigentlich nicht davon zu überzeugen, daß wir "in Flammen geboren" sind. Sängerin Laura Logic, die ich bei der Produktion von Essential Logic immer großartig fand, versucht hier leider ständig die höchsten Bereiche ihres Stimmvolumens auszuschöpfen und trägt das ganze dann mit einem dauernden Zittern in der Stimme vor - auch wenn der musikalische Fachausdruck hierfür "Timbre" lautet, geht's mir ziemlich auf die Nerven.

New West

September 22, 1980

Greil Marcus

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."

The Wire

June 1997

Mark Sinker

Writing 17 years ago, in a magazine called New West, Greil Marcus spoke of the "most surprising 45 I've heard this summer", The Red Crayola's "Born in Flames", on Rough Trade, a song which included a couplet he couldn't help but savour — because its words shot his own life's project so unerringly in the heart: "Of America's mysteries/none remain." These words had been written by Art And Language, a schismatic far left Brit Art collective every bit as pompous as its name suggests, as hustlingly eager as every other unloved revolutionary sect in those days to gentrify punk, to purge its unpolitical waywardness even as they wrapped themselves in its chart glamour. As did we all: and anyway, so potent were the forces that punk unleashed that even bandwagoning middleclass Trots discovered cool for a month or two. [...]