Know Your Outsider Pop - Paul Hawkins and The Awkward Silences

Know Your Outsider Pop
The title of How We Lost the War is a reference to REM's How the West was Won and Where it Got Us.
The Precautionary Principle is a risk management principle defined in the 1980s regarding risk-taking in uncertain environments. It essentially argues that, if there is no consensus that an action is not harmful, the burden of proof
regarding whether it is safe should fall on those who want to act, not those who oppose the action.
The Day I Saved the World is a sequel of sorts to On My Way to the Nuclear Plant, which featured on Paul's first album The Misdiagnosis of Paul Hawkins.
The New World Order is a long-rumoured secret group who supposedly manipulate the world events to their own ends. Most New World Order conspiracies can be traced back to Serge Nilus' 1905 text The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, which purported to prove a secret Jewish plot to rule the world but was later exposed as a forgery. It's also the name a mid-90s wrestling tag team. That second fact is not particularly relevant to the song.
The Black Hound of the Western Wood references various mythical Hellhounds that are said to stalk the British Isles including Barghest in Yorkshire, Black Shuck in East Anglia, the Gytrash in Lincolnshire, the Yell Hound in Devon and
Cŵn Annwn in Wales. Hellhounds are huge, savage beasts, usually black in colour, with eyes like that burn like lanterns. Encountering a Hellhound was believed to be a portent of certain death. The most famous fictional telling of the
Hellhound myth is Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Canonbury is an area of Islington, North London. In reality there is no actual record of any witch trials being held there and the song owes far more to the Pendle Witch Trials, which took place in Lancashire in 1612. However Canonbury
has played host to two early serial killers – Canonbury Besse and Country Tom. Besse – real name Elizabeth Evans – would use her charms to lure men to meet her and then Country Tom – real name Tom Sherwood – would leap out of
hiding to murder the man so the couple could rob the body. The couple were executed in 1635 and Sherwood's body was hung in chains near St Pancras church to deter fellow thieves from following in his footsteps. This was not a
success – shortly afterwards a group of thieves robbed a man underneath the hanging corpse and, when they found to their frustration that their target had no money on him, they took revenge by binding their victim naked to the
chains that held Sherwood's corpose and lashing him severely.
(Paul wants to thank executedtoday.com for the above info.)
It goes without saying that the title of It Takes a Nation of Idiots to Hold Me Back owes a debt to Public Enemy. The lyric “I only want what I deserve” is an inversion of a lyric from Tim Ten Yen's Sea Anemone. The extent to which Vincent
Van Gogh and William Blake respectively struggled for recognition during their lifetime is often overstated but certainly neither reached anything like the level of fame they managed posthumously. Blake perhaps saw himself as a
painter more than a poet and, although he is now best known for Jerusalem, the 1808 poem was not set to music until over 100 years later in the midst of World War One, when it was seen as sufficiently patriotic to help convince people
of the moral cause for Britain continuing the war.
German International Horst Eckel was the first ever Substitute to be brought on during a football match, during the 1953 World Cup Qualifying campaign. Substitutes were not introduced into English football until 1965-1966, with
Charlton Athletic's Keith Peacock the first player to be brought on. Johnny is based around a children's urban legend. The version referred to in the song was told in various primary schools in England during the 1980s and 1990s but various other versions have existed through various times not only in
England but throughout Europe and the World. Classic Ghost story teller M R James tells a version in the story There Was a Man Who Dwelt By a Church Yard and links it back to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.
The lyrics of Walt Will Rise Again are based around a popular myth that Walt Disney has been cryogenically frozen. Captain Phoebus and Esmerelda, who are referred to in the song, are characters from the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Both are portrayed as significantly more sympathetic and heroic in the Disney film than they are in the book. Hugo's Captain Phoebus is a particularly spineless and unpleasant figure.