Pillars of Society is his debut album, and prompted Rolling Stone Magazine to claim "arguably the best protest album ever made in Australia' as well as proclaim Kev to be "Australia's Black Bob Dylan"

This is the Song Cycles (Kev's own record label) reissue.

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Pillars of Society

The pillars of society
Cruise down the road each day;
They got the economic wherewithall
We can’t afford to pay
They got numbered bank accounts
Their system assures they win
They exploit the population we on the outside lookin’ in

CHORUS
Them pillars of society
Drive us like a tool
To them that cool

They drive Mercedes Benz and Porsches
Live Rolls Royce gilt-edged lives
You can tell the affluent effluent
By the status symbols that they drive
When you on the dole queue
They tell you to your face
You a bludger on their system
And a blight on the human race

They grace the social pages
Always make the news
At the church on Sunday
They crowd in the front pews
There’s a hierachy of dominace
With the power at the top
If you think you’ve found the magic key
You’ll find they’ve changed the locks

Walkin’ down the freeway
On their dotted line
We’d like to make decisions
But they won’t allow the time
It’s said religion is the opium
I say the media’s the cocaine
24 hours of propanganda
druggin’ my poor brain

They confer titles of status and dominance
On their progeny and their class
"sir" – "Your honour" –
"Your Grace" – "Your Highness" –
We’re made to polish
And lick their____brass
But you my friend can be like them
If you have their million dollar fee
But you’ll find their system’s designed
To keep us in line
And walkin’ on our knees

Jack Deelin’

Jack Deelin went a walkin’
Upon a market day
From half mile outside the town on foot he made his way
Once a week he had a job
At the saleyards draftin’ stock
Half the price of the standard wage
And a feed was what he got

CHORUS
Jack Deelin how we gonna win
When we’re guilty of their darkest crime
Of bein’ zipped up in Black skin?

We livin’ on the fringes
Far below the standard line
They say our heritage is dead and gone
They bury it back in time
We’re exiled in the very land
Of our ancestors and gods
Pushed back across our hunting grounds
And shot down like a dog

There’s genocide upon our child
Our women were raped and beat
The law’ll slam you in a cell
For just bein’ on the street
We’re livin’ in the river beds
And in the urban slums
They give us that tag of lazy cats
That won’t get off our bums

They term us jet black or hybrid
Well it matters nothin much
We’re black that’s that we’re third rate
And they treatin’ us as such
They mail us welfare handouts
And fed us on sheep guts
They satisfied their conscience
We won’t bite the breast we suck

Flagstone Creek

Gotta brand new brother
Down on Flagstone Road
Who sees more to life
Than bein’ bought and sold
With acres of trees
And wildlife crowdin’ his back door

CHORUS
Like sunshine
Through the mists of a mountain morn
Into my insecure basic blue
When you’re slammed on the floor
Our of reach of the door
And this woman bends softly
and whispers to you

Lean on me brother
Let this sister take your heavy load
Lean on me brother
Let this sister take your load

When I get lost and I am tired and worn
I use his hillside haven to calm my storm
It’s a better medication
Than them empty brown bottles of booze

Moonlight peekin’ over the crested hill
Evenin’ breeze pushin’ at the window sill
There’s the silhoutted shadow
Of a night owl on the moon

When ya dissillusioned
Ya hard, when ya cheated you’re shy
Whats one mans facts
Is just another mans lies
You’re constantly searching
For a thief in a new disguise

Attack Attack

If you are a workin’ class woman
If your socialist, unemployed or black
If you support redistribution of wealth
We’re under Attack-Attack-Attack
From this system’s new right
Who worship power and might
Who wanta purge the ‘pinks’
An’ anyone who thinks

CHORUS

"Be born, be silent, consume and die"
We can shatter this cycle
If we collectively try
Attack-Attack-Attack fight back

We gotta go through the window
The new rights locked the door
Like an expo landlord
They keep the powerless poor
We pay our P.A.Y.E taxes
So the elite and the yuppie D.I.N.K.S
Can drink champagne – eat caviar
See how they think?

It’s easy to see
What this new right’s doin’
Control our destiny
An’ collapse our Unions
Privatize our existence
Abolish our free medical centres
Control every door
Through which we must enter
Under the old guise to: Rationalize, Objectivize-Privatize-Fanticize Harmonize-Economize-Democratize?
All new right lies
Iron out the kinks (that’s us)

They want to celebrate
Their invasion of 1788
The whiplash on each convict’s back
The theft of our land
From each black woman and man
Power is their passion
Their sexist, racist system stinks
They seek to celebrate subjugation
And their imperialist colonial links

If your a workin’ class woman
If you socialist, unemployed or black
If you support redistribution of wealth
We’re under Attack-Attack-Attack
From this system’s new right
Who worship power and might
Who wanta purge the ‘pinks’
And anyone who thinks

Thou Shalt Not Steal

In 1788 down Sydney Cove
The first boat-people land
Said sorry boys our gain’s your loss
We gonna steal your land
And if you break our new British laws
For sure you’re gonna hang
Or work your life like convicts
With chains on your neck and hands

CHORUS
They taught us
Oh Oh Black woman thou shalt not steal
Oh Oh Black man thou shalt not steal
We’re gonna civilize
Your Black barbaric lives
And teach you how to kneel
But your history couldn’t hide
The genocide
The hypocrisy to us was real
’cause your Jesus said
you’re supposed to give the oppressed
a better deal
We say to you yes whiteman thou shalt not steal
Oh ya our land you’d better heal

Your science and technology Hey you can make a nuclear bomb
Development has increased the size to 3,000,000 megatons
But if you think that’s progress
I suggest your reasoning is unsound
You shoulda found out long ago
You best keep it in the ground

Job and me and Jesus sittin’
Underneath the Indooroopilly bridge
Watchin’ that blazin’ sun go down
Behind the tall tree’d mountain ridge
The land’s our heritage and spirit
Here the rightful culture’s Black
and we sittin’ here just wonderin’
When we get the land back

You talk of conservation
Keep the forest pristine green
Yet in 200 years your materialism
Has stripped the forests clean
A racist’s a contradiction
That’s understood by none
Mostly their left hand hold a bible
Their right hand holds a gun

Comrade Jesus Christ

He was born in Asia Minor
A colonized Jewish man
His father the village carpenter
Worked wood in his occupied land
He was apprenticed to his father’s trade
His country paid it’s dues
To the colonial Roman conquerors
He was a working-class Jew

Though conceived three months out of wedlock
The stigma never stuck
He began a three year public life
But he never made a buck
Because he spoke out against injustice
Saw that capitalism bled the poor
He attacked self-righteous hypocrites
And he condemned the lawyers’ law

But they’ve commercialised his birthday now
The very people he defied
And they’ve sanctified their system
And claim he’s on their side!
But if he appeared tomorrow
He’d still pay the highest cost
Being a ‘radical agitator’
They’d still nail him to a cross

You see
He’d stand with the down trodden masses
Identify with the weak and oppressed
He’d condemn the hypocrites in church pews
And the affluent, arrogant West
He’d oppose Stalinist totalitarianism
The exploitation of millions by one
And ‘peace’ through mutual terror
And diplomacy from the barrel of a gun

He’d fight with Joe Hill and Waleca
Mandala and Friere
Try to free the third world’s millions
From hunger and despair
He’d stand with the peasants
At the pock-marked walls
They’d haul him in on bail
He’d condemn all forms of apartheid
And he’d rot in their stinking jails.

He’d denounce all dictatorships
And Mammon’s greed
And the exploitation of others for gain
He’d oppose the nuclear madness
And the waging of wars in his name
He’d mix with prostitutes and sinners
Challenge all to cast the first stone
A compassionate agitator
One of the greatest the world has known

He’d condemn all corrupt law and order
Tear man made hierarchies down
He’d see status and titles as dominance
And the politics of greed he’d hound
He’d fight against
The leagues of the Ku Klux Klan
And the radical, racist right
One of the greatest humanitarian socialists
Was comrade,
Jesus Christ.

Black Deaths in Custody

There’s one Black brother dead
Down in the Roebourne jail
One black martyr crucified
The cops drove in the nails
200 years of custody
We not allowed no bail
How do you face the mornings
When this injustice still prevails

CHORUS
Show me the justice
To be had here in this land
Show me the justice for every Black human being
Show us Blacks the justice
In this White democracy
When you can execute us without a trial
While we held in custody

One black brother gunned down
Inside the Moree town
The communities across this land we
Mourned as they laid him down
200 years we been forced
to stand beg outside the door
the system treats the symptoms
it never attacks the cause

There’s a black brother killed
in a Brewarrina prison cell
200 years we been beaten down
200 years of hell
clamped in chains worked like slaves
never got a fee
how can you say it’s justice
with his killers runnin’ free?

One black brothers dead
Down on too many jailhouse floors;
Beaten down and sacrificed
Before the British law
200 years you celebrate a heritage of shame
you stole the land from which we’re banned —
left us walkin’ in the rain

White Bourgeois Woman

He fell for her in ’85
It was a vertical drop
Restless nights n sheets of white
The passion never stopped
She studied to be a lawyer
He couldn’t break the spell
Two years of frenzied passion
Then a descent into hell

CHORUS
Oh, white bourgeois woman
Change your cultural mentality
You’ve experience but a fraction
Of our Black reality
When you seek your liberation
Clasp a firm Black guiding hand
We say Black in fact’s the colour
And the Spirit of this land
White bourgeois woman

Most men encounter one woman
For whom they’d die or kill
Rot in a stinkin’ dungeon
Or be shackled against their will
She was such a woman
She stood far above a man
She conquered all academia
But she never knew this land

The pain of her rejection
Nailed him to the floor
Left him wanderin’ on the freeway
Still beggin’ her for more
She cast him off with disdain
She treated him as shit
She cast him off intellectually
Against the desire of her clit

He turned his face against the wind
—-towards the sunset of the land
she’s gone so long and now she’s found
a white brand new bourgeois man
she feels the need for companionship
and comfort in the night
they’ve a culture there in common
they’re not racially oppressed
they’re white
bourgeois woman,

Twisted Rail

Fast Willie’s on the corner
Tryin’ to make a kill
He’s got this inclination
She wants a $50 bill

CHORUS
Life can be hard trackin’
When yoo’re runnin’ out on a twister rail
I keep hopin’ that that mornin’ wind
Come blow my blues away

Malcolm’s got a razor and a
Jack-knife up his leg
He’s a friend of crooked Louis
Who can’t lay straight in bed

Well I work all week for money
skippin’ meals to get ahead
I find the Federal Taxman
Come and eats up all my bread

Blind Arnold’s highly anxious
It’s a sad predicament
He’s made it to the pay-loo door
But found his penny bent

The magistrate is constipated
This ‘aint my lucky day
They slammed me in the prison cell
And they throwed the key away

Sexy Sandra drives me crazy
She keeps begging me for more
I see nothin’ through her key-hole
‘cept her old man’s pugnozed 44

I staggers home this evenin’
She meets me at the door
With a rollin’ pin and Pinscher dog
She pounds me to the floor

CHORUS

Black Bess

Black Bess in White light
All covered in blue
Now she trips out on cocaine
’cause there’s nothin to do
since his man in’ his gland
they up an’ shot through
you lose most in lovin’
you win only a few

CHORUS
Time Lord it drags heavy on me
Sad evenin’s alone and my thoughts are on she
I fear that down here you seldom can see
Do you have an idea what lonely can be?

His delight at the sight
Of a worn apple skin
Goes with his hat in his hand
To the next rubbish tin
He’s consoled by the role
That his bottle will bring
Means as much to his being
As a throne to a king

See he with his ego
on his own shadow fall
Saw a caged man with his bare hands
Bust through a brick wall
For 45 years of his life
He had shorn
Then he wakes up one mornin’ to find his life gone

Frankie’s Vietnam was spent dodgin’ lead
But eventually the enemy blew off his head
His weight was a feather as they carried him in
One half of a friend
They sent home in a tin

Pillars of Society

Pillars of Society