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Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Sleepytime!

September 4, 2020 at 11:14 pm #1564497

blinky465

17028xp

@limburger – that’s pretty bleak. In the English version there’s no indication that so much time has passed. I actually quite like the way the song is left hanging at the end, with no final chord “resolution”. But played live, most people like to hear the main riff played through to “finish” the song on a high. I always feel the song loses something when we play it like that.

From memory, the last verse was something like:

Ninety nine dreams I have had, and every one a red balloon
It’s all over and I’m standing pretty, in the dust that was a city
If could find a souvenir, just the prove the world was here
And here it is, a red balloon. I think of you and let it go……

It’s sort of the same idea, but the German equivalent does feel more “hopeless” at the end!

When this came out in the UK in the early 80s, we still had government information adverts playing on the TV, telling us what to do in the event of a nuclear war. I was only a kid, but I remember asking my grandma how hiding under the stairs was supposed to save families from radiation fallout! (“up north” we still had Anderson shelters from WW2 in people’s back gardens – metal-lined, semi-underground bunkers always seemed a safer bet to my 8-year-old way of thinking!)

Actually listening to the words, especially back then, was quite profund. I’m often surprised by how few people really understand what the song is about.