If you take a proper butchers at the world around, it’s very clear it isn’t built on something sound
But it can easy look like that’s the way it is, and it can easy seem the way they say it is
To pull back from this brink of despair
To navigate it out of this nightmare
The way to go has to be to share, the heaven sent
You told me that you glimpsed it as if through the trees, look, it’s always in full view very obviously
Got to simply say how it’s all going wrong, for sure simple enough to fit into a song
It’s simple justice that you pay your fare
To hold this wondrous jewel of which we all are heir
The answer’s always been that we should share, the heaven sent
For sure a special secret has been cloaked and caged, and be called a curious relic from another age
But evermore it hovers with timeless intent, and ever its meaning grows more insistent
We must bang on until the world’s aware, for all to understand what’s really fair
Bring about the day when we can share, the heaven sent
What it always meant, when it was how it went
Share, the heaven sent
Music by Paul Greening, Roger Sampson, Stewart Paul Bickel, Kennedy Humphreys; Lyrics and Melody by John Harris
John Harris – Vocals, Bass; Paul Greening – Guitar; Roger Sampson – Guitar; Stewart Bickel – Drums
Recorded at Inter-Galactic Arts and at SLW; Produced by John Harris; Engineered by Matt Hall at SLW Studio
It’s an odd anomaly that ‘heaven sent’ didn’t become London rhyming slang for ‘rent,’ in any sense of the word. In classical political economy rent meant what came from nature, literally heaven sent. For a century or so, the word ‘rent’ has been twisted around to mean what a landlord received from a tenant as payment, a payment which the landlord puts nothing into earning, so, in this sense, too, rent could be said to be heaven sent. Thus ‘heaven sent’ surely should be the slang term for ‘rent.’ The heaven sent being referred to in this song is the classical kind, that which comes from nature, and that Adam Smith identified as the natural source of public finance, which could be collected without affecting trade and the wealth of the people at large.