ELO, Lyrics:
Hello my old friend.
Early morning day is dawning
Cooling towers and factory gates
Dirty streets and laughing people
Skinny dogs and beer crates
Hello my old friend
Hello my old friend
Sad canals green black water
Somewhere bicycles and beds
Wet and windy afternoons
And pigeons coo in garden sheds
Hello my old friend
Hello my old friend
High-rise tower blocks with panoramic
Views of trains and coal
Tiehead railway tracks tread faithfully
The gas works to behold
Hello my old friend
Hello my old friend
Just to see the sunset
Pretty rainbows over your majestic towers
To feel your earth beneath my feet
Here I could stand for hours and hours
(young girls sing f'rere jaque in the background)
Big machines that once were champions
Turn to dust under the sky
Broken windows choking chimneys
Factory walls for miles and miles
By bye my old friend
By bye my old friend
Just to see the sunset
Pretty rainbows over your majestic towers
To feel your earth beneath my feet
Here I could stand for hours and hours
Jeff Lynne
From the 1983 LP, Secret Messages.
Facts:
"Hello My Old Friend" from Secret Messages. This song, originally meant to be the closer of the original double Secret Messages album, is chock full of hidden things. First off, after the first vocal bridge (ending "...here I could stand for hours and hours"), someone (probably Jeff) can be heard calling out "'spatch and mail" twice, in reference to old calls for newspapers for sale in Birmingham.
The section before the middle breakdown and is the "backwards messages can be fun/funny" line, first as heard on the original song, then reversed so that the message is heard forwards.
During the long breakdown, there are a great deal of hidden voices heard, but they are so jumbled that very few of them are particularly clear; what is heard is what sounds like a children's choir singing the French nursery song, Frère Jacques (a theme that is repeated later in the song) and what sounds like birdsong but may actually be some hidden message.
After the second vocal bridge, the shouting out of "'spatch and mail" is again repeated twice.
During the song's repeated ending, there is a lot going on, however one section that is quite clear is the children's choir singing the first two lines of Frère Jacques; they might be singing the rest of the lines, but if so, it's lost under other noises.
Later during the repeated ending, a high speed section is heard; this section is actually a backward, sped up, altered frequency recording of the children's choir singing Frère Jacques again. There may be much more in this song as there are a lot of odd, interesting sounds that may hide something that has yet been identified. Note that this song, originally meant to be the album closer, would have also had the album closing material that eventually ended up on the song Rock 'n' Roll Is King.