Games Without Frontiers (covers)

I threw some old PWEI on recently and (re?)discovered their song 'Games Without Frontiers' (1993) with it's great chorus hitting a perfect mix of pop and melancholy. I had thought the title was a reference was to Buckminister Fuller's 'Great Peace Game' or the philosophical book 'Finite and Infinite Games' but it was actually to a strange European game-show and the song itself was a cover of Peter Gabriel's original from 1980.

The theme of the song is fairly clear - world politics is just silly kid games on an adult scale - but it is hard to express the details. The lyrics are mostly an international list of kid's name (sasha, hans, suki, willi, jane) as they whistle tunes, hide in sand dunes, build bonfires and shout rude names from tree forts. They are also engaged in darker activies in "the jungle" where they "kiss baboons" and "piss on the goons".  It paints a picture somewhere between a typically British sea-side vacation and Lord of the Flies. The line "piss on the goons in the jungle" sounds to me like a reference to Vietnam where the US killed 'gooks' but I don't know - and that is typical the darkness that pervades the song but never expresses itself.

Similarly the line "Adolf builds a bonfire, Enrico plays with it" sound like Italian physicist Enrico Fermi pioneering work on the first nuclear reactor in the wake of the Adolph Hitler's own nuclear weapon experiments, but the connect is vague and there are many Nazi/bonfire connections.  I suspect many of the names could be reference to politicians, for example, Chiang Ching could be Chiang Ching-kuo the President of Taiwan in 1980. There is an arty vagueness to it all but it works.

The second major element are the references to two European gameshows of the era, 'Jeux sans frontières' being the French version (Kate Bush sings this at the beginning of the song, it's English translation is the title of the song) and ''It's A Knock-out" it's English counterpart.  I'll let Wikipedia take the first crack at explaining the show"

Wikipedia wrote:Jeux Sans Frontières (English: Games Without Frontiers, or Games Without Borders) was a Europe-wide television game show. In English-speaking countries, the show is also known as It's a Knockout, the title of the BBC's domestic version.

In its original conception, it was broadcast from 1965 to 1999 under the auspices of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and featured teams from different European countries in outlandish costumes (often large latex suits) competing to complete bizarre tasks in funny games. The original series run ended in 1982.

The idea of the show came from French President Charles de Gaulle, whose wish was that French and German youth would meet in a series of funny games to reinforce the friendship between France and Germany. The games were inspired by the matches between French cities. Some games were played in swimming pools. In 1965, three French men (Pierre Brive, Claude Savarit, and Jean-Louis Marest) spread the idea of the games to other European countries. Teams representing France, Germany, Belgium, and Italy took part in the first edition of the show called Inter Nations Games.

In essence replacing absurd European industrial warfare with absurd sporting competitions (which is what I assumed the Olypmics were supposed to be before they became a quasi-criminal commercial enterprise). The idea sounds good but it practice it is surreal mix of European folk-rituals with arbitrary competition that has to be seen to be believed.



There is no way I can parse all the strangeness. The bear costumes alone invoke bear-baiting, trained circus bears and ancient Wildman mummer costumes! The next 4 European photos/pics all relate to the clip above, so good luck sorting all this out...  






['Straw-Bear' Ritual]



The maid and 'may pole' certainly reinforce the folk elements...



The final element is Gabriel's strange chorus, "If looks could kill they probably will - in games without frontiers." I'm not sure if he saw an episode of Knockout where the contestants were glaring at each other or if this a prediction of some bizarre gaze-based weapon. The idea that Gabriel is talking about some sci-fi 'Medusa weapon' is not as unlikely as it first appears, six years later Kate Bush will devote a whole song ("Experiment IV") to military research into sonic weapons, and her lyrics are explict about it: "We were working secretly for the military [...] They told us all they wanted
was a sound that could kill someone from a distance."

TL/DR: futuristic weapons, surreal European game-shows, and geopolitics as a kid's games writ large.
Now on to the music:

The Original Song from 1980 (this was Gabriel's first Top 10 hit)


The 1993 PWEI cover (you can clearly hear next year's 'Dos Dedos Mis Amigos' sound in it)


A great 2003 cover that allows you to actually comprehend the 'jeux sans frontières' chrous




And for good measure Kate Bush's freaky "Experiment IV" (1986) that used to unnerve me as a kid