The Ghosts Of Flanders

Album: Love and Murder (2008)
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Songfacts®:

  • The name Flanders will be forever associated with the senseless slaughter of the Great War; the town of Ypres alone saw no less than three battles during this great conflict. In May 1915, a Canadian soldier serving on the Western Front wrote one of the most famous of all war poems, In Flanders Fields. Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae died in January 1918, not on the battlefield but from pneumonia complicated by meningitis while working at a military hospital.

    "The Ghosts Of Flanders" is a contemporary attempt to come to terms with the madness that was Flanders and World War One, and all the more significant in that the music was composed by a German and the words written by an Englishman.

    In a June 2010 interview with Songfacts, Troy Southgate said: "I've driven through Flanders many times and it's a very bleak and moving part of the world, but I think my main reason for writing this song was because Seelenlicht is an Anglo-German project and there's a kind of united-in-tragedy vibe going on." >>
    Suggestion credit:
    Alexander Baron - London, England

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