This song was anchored on and around the bass line. It's a simple minor blues pattern and I was thinking about some of the dirty politicians which gave me a loose theme and starting point for the narrative of the song.
I love the first line which goes “get out of this dirty town” and then “it goes a bit like this”, as if to say, I’m just starting the song, and it's kind of like this but it might not be. I think that was just a throwaway line at the start that I was going to change, but in the end I liked it so much it ended up in the finished song.
I mentioned politicians earlier and whilst I do not reference anyone specifically, at the time this was written, Donald Trump was president and Boris was our Prime Minister.I think most songwriters are guilty of using metaphors and that’s certainly true of me on this song. I think it's good to let the listener try to work out the meaning behind a metaphor and to this end, I won’t go into too much detail about each line.
It hung around for a while as I wanted to get a bridge section nailed down, and that took a couple of months before I had something I was happy with. I was half planning for this album to be a kind of concept album, and the title I had in mind was ‘The Great and Secret Show’, and this is why there’s a line in the middle section which refers to ‘the great and secret show’, but ultimately this wasn’t the direction I ended up going in. There’s also the line ‘could this be a movie now’, which was a reference to the song The Man With the Camera.
The quiet and slightly psychedelic section in the middle was stolen from a song I wrote in the 90’s which never really went anywhere but sounded a bit ‘Beatley’. It adds dynamic to the song as a whole and because it is almost ethereal, the solo section has a big impact when that comes back in.
For the solo section, I was torn between a dirty synth sound or a guitar solo. So I recorded both hoping that Matt would choose one or the other. As it was, he made the genius decision to use both in a question and answer scenario.
For the ending, I was really struggling but Matt suggested what we ended up with, and for a really cool end, I reversed the main guitar intro section to make the production feel like it had gone full circle.
As with a lot of songs, this took a while to develop as the lyrics did not come easily. Lines need to flow well, and getting the right balance is not always easy. I probably have about four other songs worth of lyrics with the lines that I cut / changed in this song before it became the final version.
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