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“A friend of mine had been ill a few times so I sat down and wrote this song for her as a kind of ‘get well’ thing really. It’s almost a love song by default but I suppose friends are lovers too in a way. At the time I lived in a little flat just opposite the Millenium Stadium and this song was written on a Saturday night whilst Robbie Williams was performing there. ( At the stadium that is..not the flat! ) I particularly like the key change at the end. Oh, by the way, see if you can spot the phone ringing…we didn’t notice it until we were at the mixing stage! So that’s this song and ‘Life On Mars’ by Bowie..two songs with accidental phone rings. And talking of Bowie….
“I’ve been a huge Bowie fan ever since my early teens, I particularly like the Spiders/Mick Ronson period and this is a kind of homage to that era. A mate of mine had actually spent a bit of time working with Bowie in New York and this song is about that really..I tried to imagine what it would be like to have a dead famous friend like Mr Bowie and how weird it must be to do normal things like popping into a bar or going down to the beach with such a major celebrity! Incidentally, the ‘Hey, Mr Bowie..over here Mr Bowie..’ refrain at the end is an attempt to give the impression of a paparazzi attack. This was the first song we recorded for the album and Andy was in hospital at the time so that’s me on rudimentary bass. I play guitar left-handed but bass right-handed. I think it kinda shows…”
“I love rockabilly music although I wouldn’t class myself as an expert or a purist, I don’t tend to wear the retro gear or sport a quiff and all that stuff but I like the rhythmic drive of the music and I find myself naturally reverting to rockabilly rhythms when I pick up a guitar. This is a fairly simple tune but I think it’s got an infectious quality to it. It’s written about an old girlfriend of mine who drove me to despair but I forgave her everything because she was so gorgeous. I suppose we’ve all been there. ‘Sad Baby’ was written about the same girl!”
“ I’d applied for a job as a music journalist in London and I’d done the interview and everything. I really thought I was going to get the job and, at the time, I really wanted it but I was disappointed one Friday when I discovered that I’d failed. It was late afternoon, my girlfriend was away in London, and there was nothing on the telly except bleedin’ golf so I picked up the acoustic and strummed this ridiculously happy tune. I’ve no idea where it came from but I quickly forgot my troubles and grappled with a set of lyrics which, again, were amazingly hopeful considering the circumstances. New York is somewhere I’ve only been to once but I instantly felt at home there and I suppose this song is a kind of yearning for a spiritual place where we feel that everything is going to be fine and dandy. Mike does a sterling job on those heavy guitar thingies and Stewart was right to suggest that we keep the strings down to a minimum on the choruses ( I’d wanted them much louder! ). I’m glad I didn’t go to London now by the way!”
“This is actually quite an old song, it was written for the Third Uncles and in fact the Uncles did record a version of it at the Chrysalis studio in London but this version is much better I think and much closer to what I had in mind for it originally. The story is fictitious but it came to me all at once..one of those bizarre ‘magic pen’ occasions where you feel that someone else is writing it and you’re just taking down the notes! I wanted the song to be as cinematic as possible, with a strong narrative drive and a certain atmosphere of dread and gloom. Mike’s guitar is almost like a director’s commentary! Lyrically I like the theme of how time shows how futile and small our dreams and plans are…I’ve always liked Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ which describes how a traveller wanders in the desert when he suddenly stumbles across a broken and forgotten statue of the aforementioned Ozymandias, once a great king, now completely forgotten and half-covered in sand. I knew my English degree would come in useful one day!”
“Another rockabilly rhythm although this one has got a few more twists and turns to it. Live we tend to do an extended dance-type mix in the middle but this is the concise ‘single-edit’! A word of thanks to Phil Curran on Hammond. I was actually away when he recorded his pieces for this album but I came back and was blown away by what he’d done. Apart from the Hammond, this song was recorded completely live in the studio. I like the combination of upbeat tune and downbeat lyrics..this one being yet another song about death! I suppose I should acknowledge the great R. Dean Taylor and ‘There’s A Ghost In My House’ as an inspiration for this!”
“When I first brought this song along to rehearsal I must admit I wasn’t too sure about it. I thought it was too simplistic, both lyrically and musically but it gelled from the first and we always enjoyed playing it. Now, I actually think this is one of my favourite tracks on the album! It would have been nice to get a gospel choir for the last chorus but it was only a small studio so me and Andy had to do it. I think we sound okay..not the Edwin Hawkins Singers admittedly but…hey…we’re more compact! I don’t want to embarrass the chap unduly but, once again, Mike turns out a killer guitar solo. How does he do it??”
“This one confuses a lot of people but it all makes sense as soon as you realize that it’s actually written from the point of view of a woman looking back on her early teenage years when her life seemed happier and carefree. It was originally called ‘Before I Married Phil’ but I prefer the new title. I was never a huge Elvis fan to be honest but the song isn’t really about him, it’s about sadness and disappointment..lost dreams and all that. We spent a long time doing the acoustic guitar overdubs on this one but I think it pays off. Lyrically I’m particularly proud of the ‘Geoffrey Pallister/bannister’ rhyme!”
“A perennial live favourite, this song dates back to the Six Sided Men era and it’s about the same girlfriend I discussed in ‘Gorgeous’! Obsession, jealousy, fear, hatred…it’s all there! I’ve always liked the opening lyric ‘I wash six times a day/But I can’t wash you away/You’re there like a dirty big stain/Like a word I can’t bring myself to say’. We did a video for this actually which was shown on telly a couple of times. We made cardboard instruments and proceeded to smash them up! That’s Kevin Jensen, ex-Papa’s New Faith on the organ. It’s a Crumar, a wonderful piece of Italian sixties technology which was sadly lost forever in the ruins of the old Soundspace Rehearsal studios. If you’ve got a metal detector it might well be worth the search. They’re worth a fortune these days. In any condition! I’ve always liked the rock-out section at the end and Mike’s insane string-bending!”
“You might have noticed the moon cropping up in ‘The Ballad of Jimmy Martin’ ( ‘And tonight the naked moon/Shines down like the Lord’ ) as a kind of symbol of permanence balanced against the ephemeral and fleeting nature of the human world. Here it’s purpose is the same, it’s always been there, even when we were cavemen ‘conjuring up fire from a piece of wood’ and ‘when the Romans came’. We’ve grown technologically sophisiticated ( we’ve even landed on the moon ) but the moon has always been aloof and strangely untouchable. We’ll never really ‘understand’ what it is that makes us so fascinated with it..or why we feel romantic or sad or cheerful when we see it. Songwriters have beaten about the bush when writing about the moon so I thought it might be nice to make it plain that ‘this is a song about the moon’.”