Scroll 3 Songtext
The Third Scroll — I'm Not the Man You Think I Am Karen, I'm the Actor Tony Allen

Interred in the dankest recesses of the Internet Movie Database, on pages all but occluded by cobwebs, are the bare biographical details of a person named Tony Allen. These include a brief run in the non-speaking part of Bill the Driver in The Sweeney, an uncredited appearance as a removalist in Minder, and a post-thespian rebirth as a costumier on Peak Practice, Inspector Morse and Kavanagh QC.

One of the more startling revelations of the North Sea Scrolls is that Allen's apparently undistinguished curriculum vitae is a deliberately innocuous cover story. During the long waits for calls from his underworked agent, Allen is the hidden hand behind the paintings of Francis Bacon, the secret lover of Sid James, a patient of R. D. Laing, an assiduous curator of northern soul, and the probable catalyst for the least tedious stretches of the career of Fleetwood Mac.

Even more pernicious than Allen's influence as a cultural provocateur, however, is his role as the foreman of an off-shore opinion farm, from which cadres of green-scarved agitators engulf the oblivious consumers of English media with the altogether bogus received wisdom that they are the oppressors, not the oppressed.

The life of a double agent usually ends messily.