The title of one of poet Christopher Logue’s series of translations/transformations from the Illiad struck me long ago as the best description of our age of endless anxiety and emergency: All Day Permanent Red. Its salience and relevance grows more hideously apt with each passing day, as deliberately stoked strife and fear blend with seething changes and murky forces that not even the stokers themselves can foresee or comprehend. In a world that cannot sustain its current state but seems spellbound and paralyzed by its spiralling trajectory toward ruin, the shattering disequilibrium pervades not only the howling circus of the outer world but the delicate balances of our inner world as well.
Naturally, one’s reaction to all this is to write a jaunty tune with grungy guitar and perky organ, so here it is: All Day Permanent Red.