Songfacts®:

• "Aviator" is the first track on Michael Chapman's second album, Fully Qualified Survivor, which was released in 1970. Reviewing it forTriste magazine, Steven Wilcock said: "I cannot think of another 9-minute song that doesn't seem to last long enough. The lyrics on the album evoke a feeling of hopelessness, and there is a kind of sad tone but all together I believe it can be an uplifting album."
  
  The theme that runs through this album is alienation, none more so than this epic 9 minute 29 second song which includes mournful cello and violin.
  
  One tiny criticism: "I light a cigarette just to try and slow my thoughts" - ugh! - the same horrible grammatical monstrosity appears in another great song, John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High," and in many others including the far from great "Portrait Of My Love."
• So what is "Aviator" actually about? According to the moderator of journeyman, the Michael Chapman Yahoo Newsgroup: "Michael has always said that Aviator was a paranoid flight of fancy triggered by getting a tax demand after he had morphed from head of photography / art at Bolton Art College into an acoustic troubadour. The mob is obviously not literal but a kind of personification of his fears. Like a lot of his songs from the time it also echoes back to reflections with guitar in the woods of north east Yorkshire working his art college summer hols as a woodsman hence the ahead of there times lines about the trees and the gleaming buildings to the sky." >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 2