Creeping. Up. Appearances.

What a journey this little song has been on. It was another of those songs written in protest at my inability to finish other more important songs.

I have a pretty primitive set of recording techniques which involve reverb and constantly adding vocal parts. This was how the first couple of verses and choruses came about.

Lyrically it is about the way that I feel politicians exploit their positions for self gain, and the correlation between the issues that MPs persue whilst in parliament and boards of companies they seem to inherit seats upon when they transcend their public service duties.

They’ll never tie their own hands either – just look at how expenses have in fact risen since that particular scandal. Pretty mad really.

The lyrics are quite oblique and wishy washy for me until the middle 8, when it gets a little more specific about the issue at hand, but that’s ok I suppose as a lot things that cause people anguish can be described fairly vaguely yet still make sense. I’m hoping that “sunshine keeping up the rain, but I don’t see you falling for that to gain” is an example of this…

The middle 8 and end came about two months after the majority of the song was written. Me and Mickey listened to it quite a bit and both agreed that it needed to go somewhere (that was as deep as we went), so while Mickey was working on Ex Cathedra, I got down to finishing it off.

Recording wise it didn’t take too long – it’s quite easy to sing so vocals were surprisingly quick for us. Mickey ended up writing a pretty tremendous percussion part which really drives the song on – he said to me “this needs to be a driving song, name a driving song…” So I said Boys of Summer. He listened to that and then wrote the part so who knows what was going through his head.

The final thing we did was to repatriate an old synth part that we’d originally written when we were producing The 1975/Big Sleep. It works really well so if you ever see them live and recognise it then don’t worry, it was only on loan.

Here are the lyrics:

Sunshine: keeping up the rain
Sunshine: keeping up the rain
But I don’t see you falling, for that to gain.

Daylight: deal at your rate
To everybody’s delight: you inebriate
But I don’t see you falling, for that to gain.

You lobby hard
Tripping on shop bought plosives
Picture this, picture this.

Four holidays, two new chalets
Paid off in a week says:
It’s a mess, it’s a mess.

Every scam, needs a new
scam to use as a ruse
Flotsam is as flotsam is.

Reset it, move on
Same mirror, old hand, new gun
Hopelessness hopelessness.

But I don’t see you falling, for that to gain.

X