The Last House in our Street

Written after Sands lost my way to a concert in Belfast in the early 1980s, he found myself in a street where all the windows and doors were blocked up..all the houses were empty except for one. Outside the only inhabited house in the street, a little girl was playing alone, throwing a ball against the wall…he tried to imagine how Belfast might look through her eyes and, remembering the sound and rhythm of the ball bouncing off the wall and back into her hands, he wrote this song when he returned home that night.

Sands says “The song is inspired by a street scene in Belfast during the Troubles, but I have sung it in other walled cities like Berlin in the mid 1980s and Jerusalem in the 2000s. I met a man in Whitby during the 1990s. who asked me to sing this song . He told me afterwards that he had served as a soldier in Belfast and. that when he had first heard the song, he made the decision to leave the British army.”

Lyrics and Music by Colum Sands, Copyright Elm Grove music