The music is terse, brooding. The singer spits out the lyrics: "I'm sick and tired of hearing things from uptight, short-sighted narrow-minded hypocritics/All I want is the truth/Just gimme some truth/I've had enough of reading things by neurotic, psychotic pig-headed politicians . . .No short-haired yellow-bellied son of Tricky Dicky's gonna mother-hubbard soft-soap me with just a pocketful of soap/Money for dope!/Money for rope!"
Billy Idol? Yes, once upon a time with Generation X. John Lennon? Yes, further back. He wrote it.
"Gimme Some Truth" has just been revived by Sam Phillips, formerly Christian pop singer Leslie Phillips. The song is a gem from Lennon's post-Beatles, boy-am-I-embittered period. The song closes Phillips' exquisite new album "Martinis and Bikinis."
"I just love the song," says Phillips, saying she'd initially hoped to put it on her last pop album, "Cruel Invention." She waited. "Then, not too soon after the record came out, the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings happened; then, of course, the election, and I kept thinking I wish I'd put this on. So I thought I better put it on this record, 'cause there's going to be something it can speak to. It's a really tough song."
Phillips is generally a gentle soul. She says she's "too much of a softie," going as far as to comfort a fan who phoned her hotel room late one night and just needed to talk. Phillips - married to T Bone Burnett and playing the Paradise July 21 - comes from a Christian background, and a certain moral strain runs through her work. Just don't mistake her brand of Christianity for right-wing fundamentalist Christianity.
"I really have worked to disassociate myself from the fundamentalist movement," Phillips says. "It's destroying the country. I don't think it's bringing it together. In fact I wrote, 'Baby, I Can't Please You,' with some humor and a smile, really to the right wing; we're just getting ready to do a video that conveys that." "Baby," a lilting, seductive song, is the album's first single.
Phillips has been pursuing her muse at a modest pace. Three years ago she toured solo acoustic, supporting her most produced record. Now, with "the very sparse" "Martinis and Bikinis," she is playing with guitarists Burnett and Tony Gilkyson, bassist Jerry Sceff and drummer Josh Labow. "I feel like I'm the luckiest girl in the country," she says. "I feel like I have one of the best bands around."