In the old British empire, which at its height included South Africa, a common slur used to emphasise the superiority of the British over other peoples was that we bath regularly and know what soap is for - they think soap is a sort of foul-tasting cheese. "Unwashed, dirty and stinking" was a racial slur levvied at Afrikaaners (Dutch South Africans) by the British. Alas, it seems to have passed unchallenged into this song.

Ah, that "blur effect" again: I heard this as "people farting - hardly, ever!", or Cartman indignantly denying that he was the one who broke wind.

It is of course vitally important not to over-cook. Burning chocolate is fairly disgusting. Anything containing sugar, if over-heated, presents a safety risk as it is incredibly hot and sticks like napalm. It is also hard to remove, when cooled, from ovens and surfaces.

Culinary fashions come and go. Today, in 2014-15, there is a fashion for salted caramel - strong chocolate/sugar/toffee taste with a hint of salt, which is said to enhance the flavour no end.

Chocolate of any sort releases natural endorphins, the brain's pleasure chemical. This is part of the reason why chocolate is so universally popular. Its high sugar content also helps, releasing a natural high and a brief but potent energy rush. And of course dark cocoa beans, the source of chocolate, also have a caffeine content; caffeine is a natural stimulant. what is not to like?

If indeed you need a quick pick-me-up - just stick one in your mouth and suck. Delicious.

This is a genuine recipe for chocolate caramel. Anyone presuming anything else is going on has a disgustingly dirty mind and should go and take a cold shower.

A song written by Lou Reed which appears on his band's first album, "The Velvet Underground & Nico". This is evidently a cover version.

"A harvest of life" - sex.
"A harvest of death" - killing her partner after sex.
When the man is relaxed and unwary after orgasm - she kills him after the "dance" - the "laughter and the little step". Then disposes of the body.

Another disturbing possibility here. Plants return in the spring; harvest occurs in autumn; and in the northern hemisphere this covers the period March - October or slightly less than nine months. Could this be how the Quicklime Girl disposes of unwanted children, her own and those of others? The witch/midwife does have a protected place in rural society: everybody suspects she might also be an abortionist, but nobody asks outright.

Taking her to be a serial killer of adult men: "ripe and ready to the eye" draws men in. "Rotten somehow to the core" suggests they don't get away so quickly.

Behind the bush and out of sight as a euphemism for sexual activity and a place, in an agrarian society, where it can privately happen. As old as the hills: British folk-rockers Steeleye Span recorded a version of a six-hundred year old English folk song

There is a thorn bush in our cale-yard,
And at the back of thorn-bush
There lays a lad and lass
And they're busy, busy, fairin' at the cuckoo's nest!

Several layers of allusion and metaphor here.

"the salmon salt" - a dictionary of American English idiom suggests "salmon" is related to the euphemism "Sam Hill", as in "What the Sam Hill?", or "What the Hell?"
"What the salmon?" is listed as a 19th century variant, thought to be a corruption of Biblical character Solomon.

It may also be a euphemism for female genitalia, especially in a state of arousal: the association with fish, wetness and salt. The lure used by the Quicklime Girl to draw in her victims - "Mistress of the Salmon Salt". Sexually experienced and knowing how to draw a man to her.

Quicklime - Calcium oxide - is a chemical derived from processing limestone under heat to produce a strongly caustic powder. As freelime it is a crucial component of cement and vital to the building trade as a bonding agent for stone and brick.

It is a toxic irritant and can cause death by poisoning. When added to water it generates great heat and the heat, combined with the caustic nature of the material, is capable of dissolving organic material such as human flesh. This is the real reason behind the gangland cliché of encasing somebody's feet in cement or concrete. It allows for convenient disposal of the corpse by dropping it in deep water: but the action of the cement as it sets will also crush, burn and partially dissolve the feet and lower legs, masking for excruciating torture.

Dropping a corpse in a mixture of quicklime and water may not completely destroy it, but it ensures very few identifying features are left for police forensics to identify a body by. It is also agonising if the person is not dead.

This song is not the peaceful pastoral idyll about gardening and the cycles of life that the lyrics and upbeat folky tune suggest at first listening. It concerns a female serial killer who disposes of men in quicklime after having sex with them. The Quicklime Girl is something of a monster to be feared.

Again, there is an alternative line

"And the planting's almost done"

that would be better suited to the theme of the song: of the eternal cycle of life and death, spring to plant and autumn to reap.

There is some doubt about this line: it has also been transcribed as Like a late express. This would also fit the general vibe of the song: Death moving with all the speed and force of a powerful train.

This is a call-back to the title of the album on which this song appears, Radio Ethiopia.

Also taken direct from Willie Dixon and has two levels of meaning. The Back Door Man is saying that he gets the choice meat - the delicacy of chicken - as often as he wants it. He means he is the one to get his first pick of the most desirable women. whereas the rest of the male population have to make do with pork and beans - everyday common fare, or such affection as less desirable women will grudgingly give them.

The second layer of meaning - and Dixon was a black Southern American living in the Jim Crow segregation era, who could remember when his grandparents were slaves - revolves around the specific meaning to black Americans. Salt pork and navy beans were slave rations, the cheapest form of nutrition given to the lowest class of black field-slave. The singer is lauding his relatively higher status , as a house slave who would have eaten correspondingly richer and better food (often the leftovers from the master's table) and who would have had a higher degree of freedom in an environment where there were more women. Slave women would have given preference to a man perceived to have higher status. And chicken was a high-status meal in the 19th and most of the 20th century. It was only in the last quarter of the 20th century that it became cheap and commonplace. Most poor people in the 1930's would have n ot been able to afford it.

Originally written by blues legend Willie Dixon and recorded as a single by Howlin'Wolf in 1960.The idea of the "back-door man" - the Casanova who discreetly uses the back door to get out before the cuckolded husband comes in by the front door - is found in many blues songs and is a motif enthusiastically taken up by white blues-rock singers. Willie Dixon's extended lyrics to the original song also reference a "little red rooster" as another metaphor for a man favoured with the affections of many women. Therefore this song is at least the cousin, or half-sibling, of the Rolling Stones' "Little Red Rooster", also based on Willie Dixon's lyrics. The Back Door Man is also referenced by Led Zeppelin in "Whole Lotta Love" and approached from the perspective of the cuckolded husband in "Since I Been Loving You".

"Shake for me girl, I want to be your back-door man."(Whole Lotta Love", 1969)

and "You must have one of them new fangled back door men!" (also in "Since I've Been Loving You" (1970)

Photojournalist Alex Schneideman explores the phenomenon of addiction to shopping - "retail therapy" - in a book of compelling photoimages displaying a mindless compulsion to go out and buy stuff we don't need and which only buries us in a mountain of our own possessions. the photos show tired and unhappy people on the retail trail in London, looking as if they are not enjoying the experience at all and suggesting this is a socially sanctioned opiate as addictive and destructive as heroin. He titled his work after two telling words in this song - "wants more".

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/alex-schneideman-s-candid-photographs-chart-what-happens-to-our-souls-when-we-immerse-ourselves-in-a6705241.html

This spoken prose poem was later reworked as a song on the Morrison Hotel album, "Peace Frog". 1968 was a year of protest and violent repression and Morrison is gathering his thoughts around these themes.

The March of the Wooden Soldiers is a 1934 comedy movie starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

Dancing wooden soldiers also appear in the Tchaikovsky ballet The Nutcracker and have their own theme.

Morrison is referring to the violence perpetrated during the anti-Vietnam War protests outside the ruling Democratic Party's national conference in Chicago in 1968. A largely peaceable demonstration was broken up, with great police brutality, at the instigation of the notoriously corrupt Mayor Daley of Chicago (a Democrat)

This also reflects violence and protest around the world, most notably in Paris where demonstrations and rebellion effectively brought down de Gaullle's government.

An interesting dual image, of blood shed in violence contrasted to the blood shed monthly during a woman's menstrual cycle.

This is a reworking, in song form, of the prose poem "Dawn's Highway". This song is to be found on the "Morrison Hotel" LP.

As a child, Jim Morrison was traumatised by witnessing a crash on the highway involving a wagon full of native American workers. It was his first and somewhat brutal exposure to the idea of ending and death. Accounts vary, but one telling of the tale has Morrision shocked further by his father, a senior US Navy officer, being callous and off-hand about the accident. (possibly a war veteran's coping mechanism, of putting distance between himself and death). Although this may have been retrospectively added to account for estrangement later in life between father and son: the lyrics make it clear the Morrisons stopped and offered to help.

It is possible there may be a tribute intended to American hard Gothic rockers, the Blue Oyster Cult, here. The BOC performed a song called variously Sub-Human or Blue Oyster Cult, a rather surrealist anthem about a man left to drown who is pursued out f the sea and onto the beach by malevolent oysters. It could be the girls of Shonen Knife have re-worked this into a song about a more down-to-earth peril associated with raw seafood and bad sushi.

Some versions substitute the Japanese line Kaki no tatari wa osoroshi. An online translator renders this as "the Haunting Wa fear is pursuing me". For all the possible meanings and inflexions of the Japanese romanji word "wa", look here:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%82%8F#Japanese

Sabbath's bassist "Geezer" Butler suffered from night terrors, a condition where a sleeper apparently wakes up in bed to discover themselves paralysed and not alone in their room. Sufferers describe ominous and negative vibes and the presence of an entity: in Butler's case it took the form of a silent human figure in monastic robes, usually coloured dark grey or black with the hood obscuring the face. This figure would stand at the foot of the bed and silently point a finger at Butler. It is unsurprising to see this experience surface in the lyrics of a song about being chosen by Satan, for whatever purpose. Paradoxcically, Butler claimed later that drugs he ingested eased the condition.

From 1984 at the height of the apartheid regime with all its appalling consequences, this is the song. Appreciate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxEweP2TiMk

"no gold pavements" - the folk-myth, now largely discredited, that Britain's richest city, London, is so rich that the streets a\re paved with gold. Believed to originate with the mediaeval myth of Dick Whittington, who with his cat arrived penniless in London and rose to become lord Mayor. Thousands upon thousands of people have moved to London from outside in search of a better life where the pavements are in one form or another made of gold. The vast majority are dissillusioned very quickly. The song is about people moving to London to seek their fortune and find a sort of magic only to discover the reality is bleak. But it doesn't stop them hoping.

Starlings are a common species of bird which thrive in the south of England, especially in and around big cities like London. Their preferred roost is the country but they are also seen in cities, competing for scarce resources with established urban birds like pigeons and sparrows. "tired starlings" continues the metaphor of unwary outsiders coming in to the big city from elsewhere in Britain, drawn to London and discovering the place is large and anonymous and unfriendly to rootless outsiders. This song is about trying to make it in London and finding it tough and unwelcoming. It is about anonymity and rootlessness and isolation.