Footnotes to "Laughter & Lust"

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Obvious Song

"There was a man in the jungle, trying to make ends meet [...]
When a voice said 'Buddy can you spare that tree
We gotta save this world – starting with your land.'
It was a rock 'n' roll millionaire from the USA...
Even though he's not from the USA, the rock 'n' roll millionaire trying to save the jungle could be a reference to Sting and his campaigns to save the rainforests.

"And the stars are looking down through a hole in the sky..."
Obviously a reference to the ozone hole.

"Walls are coming down between the west and the east ..."
Reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany on 9 November 1989.

Stranger Than Fiction

Mark Twain is often quoted with the phrase "Stranger than fiction", but it had appeared earlier in the poem "Don Juan" by the English poet Lord Byron (1788-1824):

'Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

It's All Too Much

"A hundred mineral waters, fun to guess which ones are safe to drink ..."
A reference to the Perrier scandal of 1990. The French mineral water company lost millions of dollars after the discovery of minute traces of benzene, a hydrocarbon thought to cause cancer, in Perrier bottled water. This hit public confidence in a drink favoured by the health-conscious and billed as absolutely pure. Unable to track the affected batch, Perrier recalled 140 million bottles at a cost of $40 million.