Neil: "There are a lot of people who want 'Sexy Northerner' to be about them but I don't really think it is about anyone in particular. I think it's about the phenomenon of seeing guys from the North in clubs. The Northerner is in the South and he's got a lot of front, dresses really smartly in clubs - speaking as a Northerner, people in the North dress more smartly when they go clubbing, and I really like the way they do that. He really cares about his appearance. He's into clothes. He wants an interesting job, like maybe he could become a graphic designer. He's very very aspirational. To be honest, he's a North-Easterner. Aspirational North-Easterners I think often have to come to London to make it whereas aspirational North-Westerners think they can do it in Manchester. It's ultimately funny. The whole idea of the song is presenting to Southerners the fact that their idea of Northerners is probably our of date - that's why the chorus is 'it's not all football and fags'. Because living in the North part of the time I'm aware that isn't that the case."
(Literally 25, 2002)
Always
Neil: "If you look at the lyrics it's self-explanatory. It's one of those 'it may seem bad now but it'll get better because summer always comes' songs. It's got a rhyme in it I really like: 'you go from A to B on demand/ like algebra or geometry diagrammed'. I like that line."
(Literally 25, 2002)
Nightlife
Neil: "'Nightlife' was written for the musical Nightlife which later was retitled Closer to Heaven. When we wrote this, we thought it was a potential single, and when the demos of the musical used to include this, a lot of people really liked it. But as a track in the musical it was completely incidental. Originally at the beginning of the musical there was simply a scene where people were just dancing to a track, and this was the track. I think it's our first Fleetwood Mac kind of track, in that it has this guitar sound. It sounds a bit like Bee Gees and we tried to get the Bee Gees to sing on it when we were recording it for the Nightlife album. We asked, but they never responded. They probably thought it was a bit close to their 'Night Fever' stuff. We recorded it for the last album with David Morales and then we weren't happy with that version and did a mix with Goetz, putting together the original demo and some of the stuff we'd recorded with David Morales. The backing vocals, for instance, were recorded in New York."
(Literally 25, 2002)
Between Two Islands
Neil: "The idea for the song came because there are two islands off the coast of Estonia called, translated, the Island of Lovers and the Island of Whores. I was there on a holiday with a friend who told be about them and I immediately thought it was a good metaphor for a song: sailing between these two opposites, these two islands. There's a very treacherous passage between them."
At the end, the song goes into "I Want You" by Marvin Gaye.
Neil: "When we recorded this at my house, I went for a run in the early evening, and as I was runnning I started to sing 'I want you' to this song. Chris liked the idea of acutally doing that, so we did it. It was a song I first heard when Madonna recorded it, and then I bought the Marvin Gaye original. What I'm singing isn't actually tottally accurate to his melody."
(Literally 26, 2003)
Searching For The Face Of Jesus
Neil: "The lyric of the song is about Elvis Presley. I thought of it when reading Careless Love by Peter Guralinick, the second hald of his big biography of Elvis Presley which starts when Elvis is in the army and ends with his death. It's a fascinating book. Elvis was always searching for spiritual answers and used to read a lot of spiritual books, and so the song is a description of Elvis in the 1970s. That's why it says he's 'fat as King Farouk'. King Farouk was the last king of Egypt and he was fantastically fat. Elvis had these guys he always hung around with who in many ways held him back and he'd be reading thses spiritual books. There's something very sad about Elvis's life, the way he was trapped. He would try to do new thing but they would never happen. In the song there is his kind of over-reliance on mysticism."
Originally the song was just Neil playing the piano and singing.
Neil: "Chris had the idea of doing it like it was a bar band playing it."
Neil: "There's like a 'Billie Jean' bassline."
(Literally 26, 2003)
Positive Role Model
Neil: "Positive Role Model is a song inspired by a Barry White sample from 'You're My First, My Last, My Everything'. It's very punky, though. It's about people going into rehab, which is such an issue nowadays. People givnig it up. When the narrator of the song screams 'I want a positive role model', they're saying they hate themselves and they want to be someone else... Positive role model is one of these bullshit modern phrases that people use..."
Chris: "Like 'believing in yourself'."
Neil: "Chris and I have never believed in positive role models."
Chris: "Quite the opposite."
Neil: "It's about the idea that celebrities can be role models."
Chris: "We wanted to do punk disco."
(Literally 23, 2000)
Girls Don't Cry
Neil: "'Girls don't cry' was inspired by the film Boys Don't Cry. I found myself playing the piano, signing 'whatever boys say, girls don't cry'. The song is a story about a girl who I thnk is maybe a lesbian, but actually we don't know what's happened really. She's running away. She's possibly killed her boyfriend, she's possibl leaving town because they've discovered she's having a lesbian affair, she's possibly pregnant and her boyfriend rejected her. We just don't know - it's only a fragment we have here. You can make up your own mind what it's about. I like the fact it mentions other song titles. She's listening to 'Lay Lady Lay' by Bod Dylan, which I think is what makes us think that maybe she's a lesbian as well. And I like the fact that it mentions Polaroid: 'a dog-eared Polaroid'. It's a little fragment of a story."
(Literally 30, 2006)
The Resurrectionist
Neil: It's one of the historical songs. It's inspired by this book I read called The Italian Boy: Murder And Grave-Robbery In 1830s London by Sarah Wise - which is about how, in the early nineteenth century, people called resurrectionists used to dig up corpses and sell them to hospitals for medical research. That was the only way they could get bodies to dissect them, and of course you learn about the human body through dissecting it. I was very fascinated by this, and all the details. When we work in our London studio I walk from the tube through Smithfield market; there's a fantastic description of Smithfiels in the book, and there's a pub where the resurrectionists used to go and there's actually a plaque now which mentions them. The song mentions two real pubs - 'we had a drink and a couple more, at the King Of Denmark and the Fortune Of Was' - and I think one of them is still there. It mentions a hanging - they used to have public hangings right outside the Old Bailey, in Newgate Street. So it's two resurrectionists, and they've seen a resurrectionist being hanged. It's quite a grim story, really. A fogle-hunter is somebody who steals handkerchiefs, that used to be a complete brand of criminality in those days, like Fagin's boys in Oliver Twist. The idea is that they've killed a fogle-hunter because he's a child with no parents living with a gang of thieves, and they're trying to sell his body. I like using nineteenth century sland. And I like the macabre humour of 'we've all got to earn ourselves a living - all it takes is a little bit of digging'."
(Literally 30, 2006)