Hollow Point by Chris Wood

Hollow Point is a track on the handmade life album by Chris Wood and it accounts the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes on 22nd July 2005 by armed police or special forces on high alert following the London bombings of July 7th 2005 and some failed bombing attempts on July 21st.

The song is essentially in the ballad form, taking this traditional form and using it to tell a comtemporary story.  The accompaniment is mainly Wood's finger-style guitar, with percussive and tonal additions and flourishes as the song proceeds, at a slow and careful pace. 

This is wonderful storytelling - the progress of de Menezes from his flat, through the streets and into the Tube - in modern language and archaic form.  Its start and end acts as a traditional shell or bookends:

Awake arise you drowsy sleeper
Awake arise it’s almost day.
No time to lie, no time to slumber,
No time to dream your life away.

It was a gorgeous summer's morning
It was a gorgeous summer's day.
His cotton jacket was all he carried
As he walked out to face the day.

Tension builds as his journey continues; the mundane is misinterpreted.  He is caught in a situation of mistaken identity and he and the police are both on track to an inevitable conclusion:

Now he’s on their cameras, he’s on their radar,
He’s on their crackling radios,
His Oyster Card is in his pocket,
At 10am through the gates he goes.

And down and down dropped the moving staircase,
Deeper down go the others too.
And through the hour glass the sand is falling -
There is nothing they can do ….

Chris Wood's performance is wonderful, understated and honest, his vocal flurries copying his guitar playing, his plain English accent recounting the fateful tale.  The killing is not reported, just the conclusion of the official investigation:

If he’d have stopped, if he’d have listened …
Commissioner said that it was no good -
He said they gave him no instructions
That an innocent man could have understood.

Just a Brazilian electrician -
Christ only knows what he came here for.
The hollow point was the ammunition.
Now it’s our turn now for some shock and awe….

Chris Wood takes his time to tell his tale, the songs is over seven and a half minutes long, but no second is wasted.  This is the best modern / traditional / protest song I have heard. It gets to the heart of the misunderstanding in the incident, the assumptions made, the rush or pressure to do something.