"I want to get off this Island, it's doing my head in," laments Sandra O'Toole. 
      We are aboard the hydrofoil to Cowes making our way down 17 miles of Southampton Water. I've met Sandra on better days. The continual cycle of early morning journeys across the water is depressing her Irish spirit. She's coming to the mainland to gain the qualifications to become a music teacher. At 35, unemployed, "it's either that or sit in the pub with the rest of them," she says sadly.  
      Playing her music in smokey pubs doesn't appeal, either. Never did. "I just won't play the game, I'm not putting on a short skirt and pumping up my breasts for anyone. It depresses me." 
      Such is the disparate quality of Island music and musicians that it is entirely possible to lose focus on the bigger picture. Generally there isn't one. 
      There is a common saying here: "Nothing ever happens on the Isle of Wight". Live music doesn't play as an integral part for the masses on the Island anymore. At least not as it did in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then every village hall became a dancehall, all the piers rocked to jiving and the thrust of live rock'n'roll. Local musician Doug Watson sums up eloquently: 
      "In the sixties there were lots of places to play. It was a close-knit thing because it was both an Island and a holiday resort. I'm not saying that there aren't other good memories for people in other parts of the country, but it's special because it's an island and people have memories of the summer. 
      "You were part of a big thing that everyone else was, like the Beatles. There were no videos then, just an odd write up in the Melody Maker. You had to go out and get the record. You couldn't tape it off the radio. 
      "In the late sixties music opened up. Hendrix and Cream doing blues. Sergeant Pepper was so different to Please Please Me. At the same time Tamla Motown came out in America. Local Isle of Wight bands followed Hendrix and Cream. Girls danced to Tamla Motown records while the Island guitarists were playing Pink Floyd, a key turning point. 
      "Discos began to take over. The rot set in for live bands who had become so diverse that they weren't interested in playing music to dance to." 
      Each decade since the 1960s has seen bursts of creativity largely stimulated by a new generation taking up instruments before moving on to college or mainland careers. Those that remain are split between full time musicians earning their living in pubs, those that have day jobs but a consuming passion to play music live when and where they can, and a small collective literally composing music in garden sheds for markets as diverse as London, Japan, and Russia. 
      There has been much talk of late about reviving the Island's economic fortune through some form of music and arts festival. The opposition to such a proposal continues to cling onto the mythology of the horrors of the last great festival at Afton in 1970. There are those, however, astute enough to realise that such events have proved entirely successful in other UK cities, towns, and villages, as annual events at Cambridge, Sidmouth, and Cropedy continue to prove.
      The Island's fragile economy needs the kind of entrepreneurial kick in the backside that was given by the Foulk Brothers, who brought the icons of a generation to perform. The fans came in droves for Dylan, Hendrix et al. Such a move would also give a lift to the Island's own musicians, who often exist as counters to the shrink wrap society where history and tradition is secondary in the strip mall scheme of things.

In this tiny diamond shaped island 23 miles wide and 13 miles deep, musicians are spread to all the remote corners. The musical fraternity is less an homogeneous whole than a collection of brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, distant cousins who might occasionally run into each other at a wedding or a funeral. 
      In recent years, the untimely deaths of local musicians has forged collectives out of the woodwork to play for charity or to remember a fellow musician. These bursts of energy have brought home a clear message that the local talent has a spiritual and often unheralded depth of skill. Perhaps the most graphic example of this was the 2,500 people who turned out on a bleak January night three years ago to watch local bands pay tribute to the late Graham Betchley. 
      Graham was a member of the band which became known as the Isle of Wight Beatles. The Cherokees might have chosen to spend the sixties endlessly chasing their tails around Britain's pop circuit in the back of a van. Instead, they held court on the Isle of Wight, bringing the cream of progressive 1960s pop and rock acts to their own doorstep (Moody Blues, the Nice, Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention et al). With themselves as support act, their 69 Club became a byword on the Island for a good Saturday night out.  
      Brian Sharpe, the Cherokees guitarist since the 1950s, literally hauled Islanders who played during the Cherokees classic era back on stage, including the surviving members of the band, drummer Ken Young and bassist Crann Davies. While 2,500 fans stomped down the melting ice under the carpets of Ryde Ice Rink and screamed for more, the reformed Cherokees turned it on one more time. An inspired tour de force of rhythm and blues, psychedelic rock, and sixties pop tunes delivered as though the clock had been turned back. Bassist Crann Davies came off stage, wiped the sweat from his forehead and declared: "That was so good you want to go straight back on and do it again." 
      Sadly, there can be no going back. Ryde is now a crumbling edifice, a pale shadow of its heydays in the 1950s. Many of the haunts of a generation are gone. Pubs became banks and old cafe's lost out to the march of fast food chains. The high street chains, now firmly established in the Island's capital of Newport, have done much to change the face of the local economy by drawing customers from local shops in seaside towns and surrounding villages into the epicenter.

Every generation will hanker after the way it used to be. Sometimes a catalyst is needed to change the way it is. A change in managership at the Quay Arts Centre, Newport is a case in point. The Quay nearly sunk itself in its elitism, but under the helm of Virgil Philpott, its artistic fortunes have revived providing a platform for local and mainland artists in music and art. 
      Another mover and shaker trying to revive the artistic fortunes of the Island's capital is Zara Smith. She sees Newport losing its soul. Old pubs continue to give way to cake shops; the arrival of mainland supermarkets is changing the face of the town. But Zara has successfully campaigned, with the help of local musicians and promoters, to bring music and theatre back into the town square. The local council got the message, providing a yearly grant for a music and theatre day in Newport's St. Thomas's Square. Summer in the Square, now in its fourth year, is an attempt to reawaken the community to its musicians and performers with a spate of theatrical, dance, and children's activities. 
      Zara herself laments that the golden days are over. She wants to return to a period of just three or four years ago when John Wroath and Duncan Jones, aka the Wayward Sons, held court every weekend in a tiny pub on the corner of the square. In a previous century, Wroath and Jones would fit the wanted posters for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The "Rose and Crown"—their Hole in the Wall retreat. 
      Here was an artistic community not defined over finger cake and coffee in an arts cafe. Nor one supported by obscene lottery grants tossed about like confetti. On any weekend, the Rose and Crown attracted a collective with no age or social barriers. It was forged solely by what the Irish are known to call the "craic". 
      Week after week Wroath and Jones fired up the congregation with more spirit than a baptist minister. Wroath, part cheerleader, always the provocateur, haranguing his audience, master of the barstool aside. A tribal thump on his electric bass as he beat time to the unaccompanied intro to his song "Just A Lover". The crowd hushed as this shaven-headed, marauding bear poured it out. "I never promised you my love at all, I never promised you my love at all, I never promised you F*** aaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllll" he would roar. Then all hell would break loose. A thundering bass line ricocheted off the low ceiling, knife edge acoustic guitar riffs issued from Jones topped by Wroath's growling vocal chords. The bar would go daft. Whacko, unleashed. The weekend's here, whoopee drunk. 
      John's more subdued partner, Duncan "the voice" Jones was the epitome of a bar stool troubadour. He pitched his Kerouac songs across that smokey, beery bar any night he played there. His voice was driven by Kerouac's inspiration, charged with soul, guitar chords like razor wires stiffened the hairs on the back of your neck. When Duncan Jones sang his "Jack" at the "Rose" it was delivered with a passion, eyes closed, heart bared right to the last bar. And that welcome-to-the-weekend crowd was right with him.

Zara shivers now when she walks across the square. The old Rose and Crown, named after a meeting between the King and a lady in Cromwellian times, is no more. It's a finger cake café, now, selling fancy bottled beer and posing under a French name. It closes early when the office workers leave town for the weekend. The ghosts of Newport reprobates who waltzed Doc Marten booted girls in long dresses around the square to the music of the Wayward Sons still linger for those who felt the sheer spirit of the place in better times. 
      Old Newport retreats to the fringes. Mainland supermarkets now compete for space. The corporate theme pubs and restaurants have moved in. Newport now sports a multi-screen complex cinema plus the obligatory Hard Rock Cafe. The "fast food microwaved quick" turnaround nature of these places pales in comparison to a visit with one of Albie Payne's gargantuan breakfasts in nearby Carisbrooke. Aside from the American sized portions on the plates, the attraction of Albie and Jean Payne's old style British café is their passion for Elvis. Twenty stone Albie still proudly sports his 1950s sideburns; Jean has her hair in the classic 1950s style and the walls of the café are filled with Presley memorabilia. Customers come from all over the Island for a good blow out. 
      For a decent pint in a pub whose only theme is to stop time, many musicians frequent the tiny Railway Medina tucked away on the edge of the gone world. Duncan Jones and his brother Roland will turn up to sing on barstools. The Railway Medina still retains the charm of the town pubs where my father once drank. The kind where the barmaid knows the difference between a boilermaker and a bacardi breezer. 
      At the Railway Medina the clientele roll their own cigarettes between nicoteened fingers as their fathers did before them. It may be the last retreat of the bohemian left in Newport. Adam Kirk, when he's down from London or back from tour with a famous folk singer, will drink quietly out of the limelight. Adam's father Mickey Kirk still regrets that his son never played football for Newport. Only the half grin, the gleam in his eye suggests he's proud fit to bust of his "nipper". Nipper is the colloquial slang to define any male between nine months and ninety years on the Island. 
      For Adam Kirk has, like three quarters of Level 42—the chart topping 1980s pop and funk band—before him, had to leave the Island to make a mark for himself. After studying his craft at Leeds, Adam worked his way through playing guitar for the Bronte Brothers, English songwriter Tanita Tikaram, and Ireland's Sinead Lohan before he got an offer to fly to New York for an audition. "I was shaking," admits the guitarist, but Joan Baez hired him. 
      Adam Kirk has a poster on his wall. It's from the 1970 Afton Festival, the year of his birth. That was the year that Tennyson's Freshwater became host to a bigger event than Woodstock, but just as chaotic. Everyone from Hendrix to Miles Davis came to play. Dylan was missing but he'd played the Island the previous year. Joan Baez came to Afton. I smiled when I saw that poster on his wall. 
      There's little trace in Tennyson's Freshwater thirty years after Afton that there was a memorable event at all. Just a small tea room of people gathered to celebrate the anniversary at Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron's former home, Dimbola Lodge. It was here that the lady set up her small studio in the chicken house out the back. She mixed with and photographed the icons of Victorian society who were attracted to the area to visit Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson, who lived at nearby Farringford House. 
      It was fitting, thirty years after nearly half a million descended on this quiet corner of the Island, that Ron Turner Smith should recall the event. Now 75, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Tennyson himself, who stares down at him from the adjacent wall. He stands in his khaki shorts, wearing an old t-shirt, a weathered faced buried beneath a rough seaman's beard, shifting the weight off his arthritic knee. "I spent a week up there after the festival making sure that the field was cleared. Go up there now, you won't find as much as a bottle top. You know we had the men who built the stage at Woodstock helped to put the stage together for the Isle of Wight. They told me afterwards that ours was bigger and better organised." 
      Ron Turner Smith was the Foulk brothers' right hand man. Without his request for assistance from the Foulks to raise funds for a local swimming pool, the first Island "pop" festival near Godshill would never have happened. Ron and Ray Foulk were the organisers through their company Fiery Creations of all three Island festivals. The forgotten 1968 festival near Godshill which attracted 14,000 fans, the famous Dylan festival of 1969 which swelled the numbers to 130,000, and the final swan song at Afton which, depending on with whom you speak, runs from 300,000 to half a million in attendance.
      The colourful ten minute talk is an introduction to the music; fellow Dimbola Lodge volunteer Brian Hinton moves to the mike. Sitting under the parlour fireplace is Dick Taylor in a paisley shirt cradling his jet black Fender Stratocaster guitar. A Victorian nymph maiden from an old painting looks down on him approvingly. He lifts his eyes up from his guitar with just a nod at Brian Hinton's glowing introduction. 
      Dick Taylor is well known to those attending today but may safely walk down the old streets of seaside Ventnor where he lives without too much fuss. The local broadsheet weekly paper the County Press couldn't resist asking in a recent interview if he regretted leaving the Rolling Stones to pursue his education at art college. 
      In the quiet way he has, Dick Taylor concluded that he doesn't envy Bill Wyman because to some degree fame traps a musician by public perception, condemns him to become a living jukebox endlessly grinding out old hits. Dick Taylor settles for sitting in small bars and venues between Stateside tours with his old sixties rebel rousing band, The Pretty Things. "This way I can stretch my music anyway I feel", he says. 
      Aided and abetted by two local musicians going under the collective title of the Sparkle Brothers, Dick Taylor shifts through some old blues tunes. Appropriately, the trio features two songs that Free played at the 1970 festival, "The Hunter" and "Wishing Well". Dick Taylor wails away on electric lead as though Afton were only yesterday, blurring notes, searing runs adding reverb to echo, whanging off the walls of this sedate Victorian tea room. Julia Margaret Cameron and her esoteric crowd would have approved. 
       
Thirty years ago, psychedelia did meet Victoriana in Tennyson's Freshwater. A backdrop of landed gentry with 19th Century attitudes railed against 20th Century liberation just as their grandfathers had denied women the vote. Today, thanks to the efforts of Brian Hinton, the two camps blend perfectly. Dr. Hinton is not only a Tennyson historian but also an aficionado of English and American psychedelic music. His books include biographies of Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison. 
      Julia Margaret Cameron's old house brims with old prints of idylls of kings, queens, "cabbages and sealing wax", photographs of Alice Liddle, aka Alice in Wonderland. There's even a picture of Charles Darwin caught with the air of an absent minded professor deep in thought. The mixture of a wooden Victorian house full of antiquarian delights sharing space with latter day psychedelia appears to make perfect sense. 
      Upstairs in the bedrooms, Dr. Hinton has laid out an exhibition of Linda McCartney's Rock Photographs from the 1960s. There's also a room of local photographer Doug White's Afton Festival pictures. Appropriately on the stairwell is the late Linda McCartney's photograph of Los Angeles troubadour Tim Buckley. Buckley's funeral in 1975 included a reading of Tennyson's "Crossing The Bar". Here was Buckley in the year of 1967 before heroin took hold. 
      In the bare-board bedrooms I stand looking at Doug White's pictures, hearing once more the evocative piano and the haunting voice of Joni Mitchell as it floated across the sun basked arena at Afton thirty years before. She's singing "By the time I got to Woodstock" again in my mind. Miles is blowing long streams of spiky trumpet while I sit on the hillside overlooking the stage with other freeloaders who didn't pay to go in. In front of me dances the first naked woman I saw in public, her hips swaying to the music. Every time I hear Miles now I see her lost, absorbed, solid gone. 
      The view out of Dimbola's upper windows stretches across a golden meadow of summer corn to the sea. It is a vista unchanged since Tennyson walked up the steep coastal path to ponder the heroic futility of the Charge of the Light Brigade. Surrealist English songwriter Robyn Hitchcock aptly describes the mysticism of the area with due licence to early 20th century history. On the 25th Anniversary of the Afton Festival he and a small group of fans gathered on Yarmouth's old abandoned railway station for the songwriters' Tribute to Jimi Hendrix concert:

Such is our preoccupation with "dead poets' societies" that much of the Island's history relies on commemorations to the long deceased rather than the living, breathing artists whose time may come in another century. Future music historians may be intrigued to uncover Robyn Hitchcock's songs and stories, written and inspired by visits to the Island, just as Lewis Carroll was drawn here to write The Hunting of the Snark. 
      Along the coast by a couple of miles is Compton Bay, a desolate beach with a dramatic view of the chalk cliffs of Tennyson's down. Here is the inspiration for Robyn Hitchcock's song "Airscape". Further east, down the same coastline, amongst the tangled trees of the Undercliff at St. Lawrence, the songwriter set his "ripping yarn" the "Glass Hotel". 
      My visit to the Island on the 30th Anniversary of the Afton festival is combined with bringing my son Robert to Alum Bay Amusements. Thirty years on and we have abandoned our loon pants but not our sense of history. Robert's trip with me to the corner of this diamond Wight will involve a young boy's dream: a ride in an open top bus from Yarmouth's quay past Alum Bay and up the winding cliff road to the Needles battery. An added bonus is that the bus conductor is Keith Gore, the whacky songwriting migrant from Yorkshire. 
      Keith Gore migrates from his native North every Spring to work on this route. He brings his wry Northern humour to delight the tourists. "No good hanging on to that seat, Missus, it's going with you if we go over the cliff up here," he laughs between telling me about Robyn Hitchcock's bus ride here last week. "He went down to Compton with his tape recorder to check some songs," smiles Keith. 

      Compton Bay's isolated beauty is compelling. Keith Gore finds inspiration for songs here, too, writing a whole series of odes to the area including the mystical Longstone a few miles from Compton at Mottistone. Gore's work is distinctly poet "launderette". His songs are inhabited by curled spam sandwiches rather than smoked salmon. The heroines of his songs are not candlelit Ophelias. Rather, they are wide hipped girls sweating over the deep fat fryer of a greasy chip shop. 
      Keith Gore follows in the tradition of many local artists. Most are destined to remain unknown beyond the shores of this tiny backwater of the United Kingdom. They remain an antidote against the onward march of the shrink wrap society into which we are descending. Individuals, bohemians and mavericks enrich the culture while pursuing their dreams. They run counter to the faceless strip mall planning overtaking our towns in the 21st Century. 
      A six minute pop saga, "Diamond Wight", written by Keith Gore, sums up the Island's rich post war music history. He delivers the song in an uneven voice somewhere between taking a gasp of his hand rolled cigarette and a sup from his pint. The song is driven along by a Troggs guitar riff wired through an amusement arcade sound system. "Diamond Wight" is a collage of witty asides gelled by a singalong chorus with nods to famous Islanders like Level 42's Mark King. It's a scrapbook of gems including:

Only a handful of Islanders have managed to maintain pop and rock music careers after humble beginnings on the Island. Among them are singer Craig Douglas, Level 42's Boon and Phil Gould and Mark King, and the Fine Young Cannibals Dave Steele. Others have dabbled, hit brick walls before deciding to exist as big fishes in this small pond. Some like Anthony Minghella have moved from local bands to establishing themselves as international names who still find time to be passionate advocates for the Island. 
      "I'll listen to that because it's by Paul Athey," he once said to me on receiving a copy of some Island music. Minghella was taking time off from editing his acclaimed film "The English Patient" to shoot the breeze about Island musicians. Both Paul Athey and Mike Jolliffe were influential to him when he once played keyboards in a little-known Island band called Dancer. That day we discussed how a talented songwriter like Mike Jolliffe never managed to become better known. "Perhaps," I suggested to him, "the sun shining at Cowes on a Summer's day is just too appealing to want to ever leave." 
      Anthony Minghella would explore a similar theme when the opportunity presented itself to make a programme for BBC Radio 4. Mike Jolliffe's "End of the Season" ran throughout the programme, which contains one of the film director's favourite lines: "wouldn't it be fun to shoot a gun up the High Street". It's a telling line about the dead of Winter in a seaside town. 
      After the demise of Dancer, Paul Athey took up a romantic notion with three other Island musicians to sail for South America to play their music. The Silver Bands single "Reach For The Stars" made number 4 in the Venezuelan hit parade before the group sailed home again, very brown and emancipated. 
      Paul Athey no longer lusts after stardom, now more content to sit in the local bars and theatres playing in a gut string guitar duo or an expanded four piece unit combining Indian, Flamenco and spaghetti Western themes. His guitar playing partner is known only by the initials SG. Both are a long way from their last crack at the big time in the four piece Choir (album on A&M Records). The call of the road no longer has that fascination for them while the sun continues to shine on the Isle of Wight. 
      Some measure of fame has been found by an almost monastic brotherhood of local musicians working away in back garden sheds for the tiny hip hop trance music label Holistic Records. P Nu Riff, aka Paul Butler and Max Brennan and Rupert Brown, are among those creating ambience out of the fog, shores and pastoral downs of the Island. They have become known as far afield as Japan and Russia while working away in seclusion. 
      Rupert Brown is a sought after session drummer who gives his passion in equal measure whether working for international names or nailing the beat behind the traps for local combos. When not working, Rupert might be found in a fraternity that has all the makings of the Island's very own Buena Vista Social Club. Revolving around the brother and sister duo of JC and Angelina Grimshaw, the collective draws everything in from self penned songs, old country blues, jazz, folk, hula and something JC affectionately calls "thrash skiffle". 
      The duo has worked all over the United Kingdom to Ireland, Europe, Japan, and California, but they return from each foray to work the bars of the Isle of Wight. Here, the support of father John Rufus Grimshaw, a character straight out of Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie, and Japanese mother Kim is fundamental to their community spirit. 
      John Rufus once eloquently summed up the musical roots of his children: "They began in the middle of the Thatcherite years when everyone was into synthesizers. Folk, skiffle, jazz, Hawaiian music all went into the melting pot. They owe their roots to the folk clubs that element of the singer songwriter bringing along a guitar. Their songwriting had started. It led them to the obscure borderline where they are now." 
      It would be a great mistake to assume that because the Grimshaws' lifestyle as musicians confines them to working where they can that they are not capable of bigger and better stages. They work this "obscure borderline" without management but with a passion.  
      The acoustic talents of JC's mandolin and guitar plus Angelina's passion for the gin swilling swagger of Bessie Smith and the bruising songs of Memphis Minnie find their voice in the Dance Preachers. The unit expands and contracts around the couple's original songs and the knock-a-wall-down power of percussionist Rupert Brown and double bassist Paul Armfield. 
      Most Sundays the Grimshaws turn the front bar of the Ryde Castle Hotel on the town's esplanade into the aforementioned Buena Vista Social Club. JC and Angelina play host to musical guests including Wally who, retired from playing music on the liners, gets up with his saxophone; Pat sings the blues; the delightfully named Amanda Lynn Kane offers some of her own compositions; or Cathy Flux adds a violin while Stevie James Gadd steps up to whack the thick string of a tea-chest bass. John Rufus beams between dancing and attempting to inspire another song writing competition to which he will pen a ditty to win the yard of ale. 
      Here, young children dance in front of the band, outside on the patio on balmy days or on the carpet inside when winter turns the season cold. JC's song "Riding On A Smile" seems to be an anthem for the way of life of those living in Ryde, where the craic is all and the music is everything:

It is plausible by criss-crossing this tiny diamond Island to find quality music any night of the week. Or it is entirely possible to miss it altogether. Sandra O'Toole yearns for more events similar to the one that lit up Ventnor's old Winter Gardens ballroom a couple of years ago when local character Mad Maff had his 40th birthday party. The party involved inviting many of the musicians who had forged their music in a burst of creativity during the 1980s and early 90s. A draughty old ballroom which once rocked through the 1960s with a fusion of music from teddy boys rock and roll to the soul pop of the mods is brought to life again with night people grooving. 
      Local characters like the madcap Merlinesque figure Graham MacFarlane, whose Ferret Theatre Company mixed mayhem and music in equal doses before fading away, is back on stage again with The Jones, whose six-foot-four-in-stockinged-feet singer Chiz still belts out songs in Newport pubs and anywhere he can find a gig. Mick Cooch is laying down diamond chords from his Gretch, still writing passionate songs as gritty as Newport's old Quay and unconcerned that he's only playing them in small pubs. Paul Armfield performs solo, plucking old Blue Note jazz ballads and original songs out of a double bass. 
      Paul Armfield may yet be another songwriter destined, like Mike Jolliffe, to find the sun shining on the Isle of Wight too alluring to desert his work in a local bookshop. He escapes in songs like his emotive "Vapour Trails", where he charms a Newport girl to come sail away with him. He describes it thus: "it's about unfulfilled potential. As JC Grimshaw would say, it's another one pulled up from the well of self righteousness." It may yet speak volumes for those who play out their lives on this diamond Wight, enriching its culture, making their mark, dreaming of "following the Vapour Trails south. . ."

        Vapour Trails

The drizzle that dampens every crevice 
The grime that soils each dream 
The nation that's forged its own shadow 
the red brick that's swallowed the green

It's no place for one of such beauty 
The poison will soon reach your heart 
There sulphur shines till it's blackened 
Come take your chances with me

I want to take you down to the river 
Follow the source to the mouth 
There we'll steal a boat 
And follow the vapour trails south

Sail away to the citrus and the saffron 
Till the cotton runs over and free 
Where the sun will greet us as strangers 
With skin pale as the moon

To somewhere they won't understand us 
When you can talk only to me 
Where there are bluebells that open 
Where there is no shit in the sea

I want to take you down to the river 
Follow the source to the mouth 
There we'll steal a boat 
And follow the vapour trails south

I want to show you you're better than this  
More than a good laugh, a grope and a kiss  
I want to steal you away from this halogen night  
And show you there are stars 
That shine just as bright as you

I want to take you down to the river 
Follow the source to the mouth 
There we'll steal a boat 
And follow the vapour trails south