Black Blizzard was inspired by the Dust Bowl disaster of the 1930s. I wrote the lyrics when I was living right near the Hollywood Bowl and the Lasky-DeMille Barn, one of Hollywood's first film studios. I hadn't been living in Los Angeles that long, having relocated from London. I became fascinated by its history and the whole concept of migration and what leads people to travel great distances, following dreams, seeking fortunes, broken promises, false hopes, basic survival�... In the thirties millions of people were driven from their homes on the Great Plains where they had been encouraged to settle and farm. Some died from malnutrition and dust pneumonia. Many came to California looking for work, starving and destitute, due to drought, barren land, foreclosure, and destruction caused by storms. The dust storms are often thought of as a natural disaster but how quickly and easily we forget that this was a man made crisis caused by greed, politics and incorrect farming techniques. Plowing displaced native long grasses that had trapped moisture in the soil, turning it to unanchored dust during drought. Winds swept it up into choking towering black clouds of biblical proportions that blocked out the sun, and buried homesteads.

It struck me as such powerful subject matter for a song that would warn of what happens when man in his ego disrespects the earth. Here is a terrifying illustration that occurred less than a hundred years ago, staring us right in the face. Nature is wild and untamable, we cannot control it, when we are long gone the planet will still be here transforming. With short term thinking we've actually put a great deal of effort into making it increasingly more unlivable for the human race. I believe we're all connected through nature and it's tragic this has been forgotten and the attitude sneered at. It also tells the story of how easily the innocent can be manipulated and put blind faith into any belief they are told convincingly enough to buy into. The lyric 'Your god has abandoned this project' means that the pyramid of worship collapsed, from the worship of money, power, and influence through to the peoples faith in the system.

We made a video with director David Kenny which dealt with the subject in a less literal way, but still conveying the foreboding nature of it with epic impact. The character I play is like the storm personified arriving to inspect damage done by catastrophic events caused by an ill-fated society. There's just a scavenger tribe of kids left in the woods and one survives, so at least we added a faint glimmer of hope in the darkness. We made the character queen-like and it really works well with the regal eastern inflections of the string parts played by Samy Bashai, world class British Egyptian violinist. The song has roots in both realism and fantasy.