No-one ever seems to talk about Black Diamond Bay, and I often wonder why – never more so than one morning recently, when I was listening to the song for the umpteenth time on my way to work, and came to a realisation about the lyric that has been staring me in the face for all the decades I have been listening to it.
There is just one idea that holds the whole narrative of the song together: it is a series of negations and rejections.
The characters in the song reject or negate each other in every single interaction it describes.
They even negate themselves.
A “voice from the gambling room” calls to the woman in the Panama hat, and “She smiles, walks the other way.” The Greek “asks for a rope and a pen that will write”, and the desk clerk, carefully removing his fez, questions whether he has heard the Greek correctly.
The woman in the Panama hat “starts to speak” to the Greek on the staircase “but he walks away”.
The soldier buys a ring from the “tiny man” who will later bite the soldier’s ear, and the ring, which “cost a grand” “ain’t enough” for the recipient of the marriage proposal.
The “loser in the gambling room” wants to play another hand, but the dealer tells him to listen to the ominous sound of the rain. The island itself is deserted by the cranes and the moon.
The woman ignores the “do not disturb” sign on the Greek’s door, knocks “on it anyway”, and shouts “I’ve got to talk to someone quick”, but the Greek just keeps on hanging himself from the chandelier. The desk clerk isn’t interested in the subject of forbidden love because “it happens every day”.
The loser breaks the bank in the gambling room, but it’s “too late now” because the island is exploding. The stranger proposes to the woman, but she ignores him and begins to pray, because when a volcano is erupting, who wouldn’t?
And then, there is the total genius of the beginning and the end of the song. The narrator hears of the fate of this new Krakatoa being Cronkited on the news, and concludes that it “Didn’t seem like much was happening”, that this was just “another hard-luck story/ And there’s really nothing anyone can say”, and he wasn’t planning to go to Black Diamond Bay anyway.
All that is left is the hanged Greek’s shoes, and the Panama hat of a woman whose passport photograph bore no resemblance to her real self. Everybody is nobody, and everybody turns away from everybody else, only to find that they don’t recognise their own selves.
It’s one of the best and funniest satires on modern disconnection, but nobody ever seems to talk about ‘Black Diamond Bay’.
Funny, that.
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