Tuning: Normal, 6th String dropped to ‘D’

Capo Position: 3

Strings from bottom to top: D A D G B E

The first part of the story of this song is on the Song Information 'Stone With a View' page. That is where Keith bought an old Studer tape machine from the BBC and started going through all his archive 1/4 inch reels to see what was on them.

In 1980 Keith was living in a room in Notting HIll Gate. Things had not gone well and he was broke. With the money from a rare well-paying job he bought a Revox tape machine and for the next year he sat in his room and recorded a series of songs.

He was looking for a direction and mostly not finding it. He will be the first to say that most of the material was pretty awful, but in the middle of all the dross there was a gem, Western Man.

It's an angry, biting song that was like an open letter to the governments of the Western world, especially the United States protesting the lack of financial support for the developing world. As hunger and famine stalked millions at that time, millions of dollars and pounds sterling were being poured into an increasingly futile arms race with the Soviet Union and China.

The song needed some work doing on the finger picking and lyrics to bring it up to date, but it had never been played live and when the first audiences heard it in 2003, it had an immediate and powerful impact.

An early version of this song has picked up over 8,400 downloads from http://music.download.com at last count.

This was also the longest song it took Keith to record - something like 60 takes over 3 weeks before he got it down to his satisfaction.

It's a strange fact of life that this song was 'lost' and forgotten for over 20 years and when Keith finally played it live, the content was still as relevant today as when it was written all those years ago