Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 41-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
In 1979, there was a near bloodless coup in the small country of Grenada, which, weirdly, I accidentally happened to be visiting. Years later, I wrote a song about it that we have yet to record properly, but we performed it on tours in the early 2000s.
Back in 1979, my travel companion and I both worked for a newspaper. He was a photojournalist whose two Nikons drew a certain amount of attention from the machine-gun-toting officials at the airport when we landed. None of this was making sense to me because I hadn’t heard about the coup, and the fact that we worked at a community newspaper didn’t seem relevant to me. What a mess! Information distress!
“Deep Dark Secret” from Water Cuts My Hands (K/Matador, 1991) (download):
