To A Little Radio/
(Words Flew) Right Around The World

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Bert told Brecht
Brecht told Bert
Words like birds flew right around the world
Right around the world
Right around the world
Words flew right around the world

Beware! Don’t look away!
Hear what the poet has to say
Songs and rhymes for the worst of times
Paper feeds the fire In the coldest winter
Bert told Brecht
Brecht told Bert
Words like birds flew right around the world
Right around the world
Right around the world
Words flew right around the world

Wake up! Look around!
The painter learnt to juggle like a clown
Poet he shouts ‘Til they chase him out
Marching into exile with an old typewriter
Bert told Brecht
Brecht told Bert
Words like birds flew right around the world
Right around the world
Right around the world
Words flew right around the world

Take care! Open up your eyes!
Words can take you by surprise
Poet he writes fights the best of fights
Taking on the painter with a pen and paper...
Bert told Brecht
Brecht told Bert
Words like birds flew right around the world
Right around the world
Right around the world
Words flew right around the world.

Featuring West Leeds’ finest, the Charlie Cake marching band.

‘To A Little Radio’ was written by Brecht as he reached exile from the Nazi regime in 1933 and listened daily for news of the war. The line ‘Bert told Brecht. Brecht told Bert’ was taken from a poem by Leeds poet Ronald Arthur Dewhirst.  We wrote ‘Right Around The World’ especially for a performance at the annual Brecht Festival in his birthplace, Augsburg.

Prophetically, in 1926 Brecht said, “Radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him.”