Electric

Chris: We went to a really good Italo-disco night in Berlin. Thereweren’t many people there, but the people who were there were really enjoying it, and they were playing all this stuff that we’d never heard, all this quite obscure Italo-disco. We felt quite inspired by this so we went back to our tiny studio in Berlin and started to write a piece of music inspired by what we’d been hearing. It was a lot slower to begin with, but it eventually ended up as “Axis”. That was the title from the beginning. When you write a song in the program Logic, in order to save it you have to come up with a name, so you end up with all sorts of silly names. They normally get dumped when the song comes along, but in this case the “save as” name stuck. Neil: I don’t remember who thought of “Axis”. Chris: I’ve got no idea. It makes it hard to sometimes ?nd songs because they’ve started off as something else, but now I’ve started ?ling them differently so that I always update to the latest song title, because in the past we used to spend hours with Pete Gleadall going through stuff trying to and / something that used to be called something else. Sometimes a title can change two or three times during its life. Neil: Originally it was a song, and it had not very good lyrics. Just formulaic relationship lyrics. Personally I didn’t think they were very inspiring. So we decided to dump them. When we started working on it for the album, Stuart decreed that we would work on the tracks in alphabetical order, so we started with “Axis”. After we dumped the singing, we decided it would be good to have some speaking stuff, and as we’d already decided that the album would be called Electric we decided that this opening track itself would be called “Electric”. Hence the lyrics: “tum it on… feel the power… electric energy”. But then when it was finished we decided that “Axis” was a better title. Chris: We’ve never had a song title that was also the name of the album, so by that rule alone we couldn’t call it “Electric”. _ Neil: My inspiration for the spoken bits was sounding a bit like Madonna saying “erotica… pomance…” All of the lyrics have a sort of vague double entendre. Chris: Stuart didn’t change it too much, but he Stuart Price’d it. He made it harder. He has these old synths that he makes interesting noises out of. Neil: He did the sound effect at the beginning. Chris: We had an idea that we wanted to have the sounds of electric power stations coming on. “Clunky noises” Neil: Also, one important thing about this album is that when we were working on the album we knew we were working on a show called Electric as well, and we assumed that the show would begin with this track. Chris: He’d already done a bit of work on it before he was working on the album. He toughened up the drum sounds and everything. Back then he was going to play it in his DJ set but then Angela — our manager, his wife — stopped him. Actually, we were a bit disappointed. Neil: Stuart liking this track so much was important, because sometimes when something is written very quickly you don’t really appreciate it enough. Chris: It’s a very rare occasion of us writing a song after we’ve been out to dinner and to a club, because we normally work daytime, and this was a night-time writing experience. Perhaps we’ll do more of it. Neil: The bell line at the end, by the way, is the only surviving bit of the vocal melody: “One way to love” it went. “Bolshy” Neil: During most of the making of this record, this was the last track that had been written, until “Fluorescent” came along when the album was actually ?nished pretty much. We wrote “Bolshy” in Berlin last year (2012) when we were working on the Alan Turing piece. We went over to write what we thought was the ?nal long section of the Alan Turing piece and the first thing we did was suddenly write this instead. I can’t even remember why we did. Chris: No idea. Neil: We just started writing it. It’s a bit of a mystery to me, this song. I’ve no idea where “bolshy bolshy bolshy oh” came from — I just started singing it. The demo particularly I don’t think sounded like anything we’d ever done. It sounded like a different group. Chris: I ’d read about this recording technique where you record maybe half-a-dozen instruments all playing the same line and then you just cut in between them so that you get this mad effect — it’s one line but the sounds keep changing all over the place. I thought, oh, I’ll have a go at that. So the demo was just an experiment to see how that worked, and then it developed into this. It’s quite an unusual-sounding song. Neil: “Bolshy” of course means “dif?cult” or “awkward” or “rude” but also is short for “Bolshevik” so we decided to put Russian samples on it. We simply translated some of the lines of the song using a computer translation program. The voice sounds great in Russian. Chris: We also started each show of the Electric tour like that: “Good evening, Moscow, welcome to Electric…” ‘Neil: By the way, some people who are native Russian speakers have criticised the translation in the song, but that isn’t our fault — that’s the translation program. And it sounds good. It’s meant to be audio excitement. The lyric has nothing personal in it — it’s just making sense of the “bolshy” chorus. It’s a pathetic man who’s in love with a very dif?cult woman. One of my heterosexual lyrics. I really like the bit that goes, “I don’t believe you don’t know you could own me.” It’s a very “up” song but it still has a favour of the anger. Because of course, as Johnny Rotten said, “anger is an energy”. Chris: Another bell line. Does every track have a bell line? Neil: There are loads. Chris: It’s the album of bell lines. Neil: It’s funny, because in the Eighties we used to struggle, with every producer we worked with really, to get a good bell sound. And a good bell sound we depned as being the bell sound at the beginning of the single mix of “Open Your Heart” by Madonna. “How do you get that bell?” No one could ever get it. It’s chunky. Now you can just get it. Chris: It’s a very, very cool- sounding track to me, “Bolshy”. Neil: I always thought it even has something very slightly jazzy about it. After the instrumental it gets the album going with a real “wey—hey”. bourgeoisie.” Chris: Stuart’s really good at using the technology to create really interesting cut-up effects. Then, at the very last minute, we added an “ooh-woah-woh—oh” sing-along bit as the ?nal icing on the cake. We were having a meeting for the Electric tour and so we used Andy Crookston and Pete Gleadall for the all-male terrace vocal effect. Neil: At one point I went away somewhere leaving Chris and Stuart in the studio and said, “Don’t work on ‘. . .Bourgeois’ because I want to be there when we work on that.” And Stuart worked on it anyway. Chris: We had to — we were working in alphabetical order. Neil: He refused to break the concept just because I’d gone away somewhere. Chris: That’s one of the things about Stuart: he ignores instructions from Neil. Neil: Edicts are ignored. Chris: Neil said, “I’m not working with the television on.” Totally ignored. Not many people would actually ignore Neil like that. Neil: Not many people, in my opinion, would have the television on all day long, but that’s a separate issue. Chris: But it was great, watching Escape To The Country everyday. We were all trying to work out how much the house was going to be. Neil: Oh, it was an education into daytime television, which I’ve never known anything about. I loved Escape To The Country. It’s a great programme. What’s interesting about daytime television is the presenters ~ suddenly you -discover that Nicki Chapman who was one of the judges of the original Pop Idol is striding round a house in Lincolnshire on Escape To The Country. Chris: Oh, she’s never off. “Fluorescent” Neil: The next track we worked on, in the alphabetical order days, was “Dream” — “Inside a dream”. But after we’d ?nished what was an eight-track album originally, I was making something to eat at home and I had music playing from my computer and suddenly this track came on, and I didn’t know what it was. I thought, “Why don’t we do stuff like this?” I thought it was something from a Kompakt record compilation but then I walked over to my computer and saw that it was a Chris demo that I had forgotten about. So I re-sent it to Chris and Stuart saying, “Why isn’t this on the album?” Chris: I did that demo in my house on a laptop and a mini—keyboard one night. Sometimes when I’m a bit bored and there’s absolutely nothing on television — and there has to be literally nothing on television, even Newsnighfs not on — I might go down to the basement and knock something up if I feel like it. Neil: Yes, one morning I woke up and on my email there were three new instrumentals. Chris: The trouble is that once you start you can suddenly ?nd that it’s two o’clock in the morning. The time goes so quick once you start messing around with music. Neil: The demo was titled “Fluorescence”. Chris: We had already decided we were calling the album Electric, so I would have been thinking “Oh yes, electric. .. ?uorescent light. . .” I would just have been in that zone of words. Neil: Then we went to Berlin very soon afterwards. Chris: It was that very modern thing where Stuart was in LA and we were in Berlin. Neil: We took Chris’s demo to Berlin and turned it into a song. Originally it had loads more lyrics. I began by working with the “Fluorescence” idea but then I said, “Do you mind if it’s ‘Fluorescent’?” and based the words around that. This is another heterosexual song. It’s about a model like Kate Moss, a very glamorous person. Chris: When I bumped into Kate Moss at the Olympics closing ceremony I said, “What are you doing here?” — not as in “Why are you here?” but “What are you doing here?” — and she said, “Walking.” Neil: The person singing the song is someone like Bryan Ferry and he’s in a club, surrounded by beautiful women, and there’s this particular woman dancing who’s a bit dangerous, with a scandalous reputation, and he’s thinking about her. He’s just thinking about where she’s gone right, where she’s gone Wrong, what it would be like to be her. Whether he’s going to chat her up. He’s kind of weighing her up. I also wanted to get in the phrase “the occasional oligarch” which I’ve had lying around for ages. We did this all in one day in Berlin and we were very excited and we were going to send it to Stuart but then Chris said, “No, let’s just wait and see what we think of it in the morning.” It’s amazing when you play something in the morning because it was immediately crystal clear that it had too many words. Sometimes I shoehom in words that I’ve had for a while. So we edited it down in a very Brian Higgins’ “What is the concept of this song?” way, so that it became very clear what it was, taking out all of the unnecessary scene-setting detail. Chris: Then we sent it to Stuart and he did some work on it. It’s a great way of working, being in different continents, because the time difference works in your favour. You send something over when you go to bed, they’ve got all day to work on it, and then when they go to bed they send it over to you and it’s the start of your day again. So actually it’s a brilliant way of working. Our demo was a bit more minimal glitch. Stuart made it more like Visage. Then when he sent it back we worked on the chorus — we didn’t have “brighter and brighter” at that point. Because I came up with “higher and higher”, and Neil went “you can’t have ‘higher and higher’ — we’ll have ‘brighter and brighter’ .” Neil: It ?ts in with the concept. Chris: It’s always “higher and higher” with me. The old rave clichés always get trotted out. “Can’t it be more like ‘higher and higher’, Neil? ‘Move your body’?” “No, it can’t.” Neil: I love this song. Fluorescence is a glamorous concept to me and I always thought this song sounded glamorous. “Inside a dream” Neil: The original version was written during the writing sessions for Elysium in Berlin. Chris: It was originally a demo I’d written. It had an octave bassline. What transformed this is when Neil sang a vocal adlib. Neil: When we decided to do this dance album, after Elysium was ?nished, Chris dug out all of the dance tracks we’d done but hadn’t recorded, and made a playlist. This was on it and was more impressive than I’d remembered. We were working with Stuart in a studio in West London, we got this one up and we decided it needed a bit more singing on it. As I sometimes do when I haven’t got any ideas whatsoever, I looked up the existing title — which was “Inside a dream” — and Google very kindly led me to a poem by William Blake, “The land of dreams”. So I sang this tune with William Blake ’s words, and then we did our Marvin Gaye thing — as in “What’s Going On” — where you sing a countermelody to the main melody. And the countermelody turned out to be much better than the original melody, so we dumped the original melody. Chris: Stuart just sets up the microphone in the studio and puts agreat e?°ect on it. Everything Stuart does is very quick and it comes across as effortless. So he just hands the microphone to Neil with a great effect on it, which lends itself to these vocals. Neil: So you’re not embarrassed. Chris: You’re not embarrassed doing them, because it all sounds amazing. Neil: I mean, you’ve got Neil Tennant pretending to be Marvin Gaye — it’s potentially an embarrassing situation, in the same way as Neil Tennant pretending to be Madonna singing “Erotica”. But put an effect on your voice and it sounds great. Chris: I think there’s something about going into the vocal booth to do the performance. But when you’re just sat in the room and Stuart’s watching television and I ’m having a cup of tea and a Kit Kat, there’s no “now we’re going to do the vocal…” thing. Neil: No, I’m saying, “Can we just turn the television down before I do this?” Chris: Bernard (Sumner) was the first person we saw just sitting in the studio with the mic. He never used to go into the booth. Neil: The words are about dreaming. Taking yourself out of your mundane surroundings. Pretty typical for my lyrics. Having a sexy dream. There ’s nothing much to it. People are always asking me about the start. It’s got backward vocals, but they are meaningless. They are simply there. Stuart did it, and it sounds great and it sounds exciting, and ?ie point of it is to sound exciting. I think it is my voice, but I don’t even know what I ’m singing. Chris: I think one of the things about this album is that it’s not really about classic pop songs. The song structures aren’t generally verse/chorus/verse/ chorus/middle-eight/chorus. Neil: There was no discussion during the making of the album of, “Right, this is a single. Take it seriously, everyone.” There was no discussion of that. I don’t know what lesson we learn from that. Chris: Nothing, probably. Neil: This has also got a great bell line. Chris: One of the best. Neil: I think my favourite bit on the whole album is this bell line and then the William Blake part. It was one of those miraculous moments where suddenly this track was 70 percent better. “The last to die” Neil: This was demoed during the writing sessions for Elysium. Chris: My sister and I often gift Apple iTunes songs to each other. I think that’s the best thing about iTunes — gifting stuff. And she didn’t actually gift this to me, but she said that there was this Bruce Springsteen song that we’d probably like. So we listened to it, and we could really hear it as a Pet Shop Boys song, just because of the chords and the four-on-the-?oor, and also factoring Stuart and the prospect of making it sound like The Killers as well. And we liked the song. Neil: We did a totally ?nished demo back then. We knew it wasn’t going to go on Elysium — we just did it for the fun of it really. Chris: We particularly liked the guitar riff. Neil: Which, on our demo, became a synth riff. Chris: Actually, I listened to Bruce Springsteen’s version again recently, and Neil’s changed the Vocal melody quite considerably. In a good Way. Neil: I didn’t really listen to it very carefully because we weren’t doing it very seriously. Chris: I hadn’t heard his version since that day and if you listened to it you’d be quite surprised. Neil: I changed one of his lyrics as well. I made it “who’ll be the last to die for our mistakes?”, instead of “. .. a mistake?”. I wanted it to be more singer-pointing. At ourselves. At we, the public. The line comes from Senator John Kerry. Chris: Who sat behind us on a right from Washington to Boston. And he refused to switch his phone off during take-off. The air stewardess had to come to him several times. Neil: His two security people sat in economy. But he was on a commercial Delta ?ight. I think if I was Secretary of State I’d demand Air Force Two for the weekend. Anyway, that’s who Bruce Springsteen got the line from: Kerry, who was a Vietnam vet, came back from Vietnam and was a witness before a Senate subcommittee and he said, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” The mistake in this case being the Vietnam war. And then Bruce Springsteen quoted it in the wake of the Iraq war. Chris: And so when we did interviews people said to us “this is your most political album”. Neil: One French journalist, particularly. “. . .‘Love is a bourgeois construct’ . . .” Chris: “… ‘Bolshy’… ‘Vocal’…” Neil: “. .. ‘I like the people’… Bruce Springsteen… anti—war song…” I said, “That’s quite a convincing case you’ve made.” Actually he didn’t say “political”, he said “left—wing”. Chris: We started the demo in my basement. I remember that Angela came round and we had a meeting there. She went, “This is a real den.” Neil: We were just making it sound like us, which is always our basic idea for a cover version. Chris: It was one of those Bruce Springsteen songs with really nice chords. The kind of thing we’re famous for as well. So it wasn’t much of a leap from his to ours, once you put the four-on-the-?oor, the electronic pad, the synth riff, we were kind of there, really. Neil: It’s still about the Iraq war when I sing it. But there’s been a lot of mistakes. I like the lyrics. I particularly like the last verse, though it’s got a word that could be one of two things. “A downtown window ?ushed with. . .” And then is it “. . .light” or “. . .life” I think on the record I sing, “. . .rushed with life” and live I sing “. . .?ushed with light”. It’s dif?cult to tell what Bruce Springsteen sings. The bit I really like is this slightly surreal moment: “I see her martyr’s silent eyes / petition the drivers as we pass by”. Chris: Bloody good, that, isn’t it? Neil: It’s a great song to sing live it’s got a singing-live kind of melody and it’s got a lot of fervour and energy in it. We haven’t heard what he thinks of it, but I thought he might be quite pleased to have a cover version that takes your song really seriously but makes it moreChris: Neil was about to go for a jog, and before he went he shouted into a microphone, “Yes yes yes yes, no no no no. . .” and so on. Neil: That was based on an artwork by Bruce Nauman, Clown Torture, where a clown shouts, “No no no no no. . . !” And when I came back from the jog Chris had written some music. I’d had an idea in my phone for a song called “Shouting in the evening” which is a phrase I’d heard attributed to Michael Gambon, the British actor. When someone said to him, “What do you do for a living?” he said, “Shouting in the evening.” Which I thought was quite funny. I think I read it in a review of a play. And then the phrase “shouting in the evening” made me think of the song “Dancing On The Ceiling” by Lionel Richie, so I made it “oh what a feeling / shouting in the evening”. Though I should point out that our melody is considerably different. Then Stuart made it noisier. Chris: It’s quite ravey, isn’t it? Neil: It turns into The Prodigy or something like that. Chris: You went up north and left me and Stuart behind to work in the studio. Neil: It was for my sister’s sixtieth birthday — I had to go up a couple of days beforehand. Chris: So I spend a couple of days with Stuart. But I wasn’t doing much — I was just drinking tea, watching television, having Kit-Kats. Neil: You were probably inspiring him. Chris: I was. “Thursday” Neil: This wasn’t a ?nished song when we started working on the album. It was a demo by Chris called “Thursday night special”. It always sounded really good, but it wasn’t a song as such. Chris: I’m not sure why it was called that. It might have been written on a Thursday night, but also me and my friends used to say, “Shall we have a Thursday Night Special?” Which was going out on Thursday. Because of course in London, Thursday was the new Friday. It probably still is. I don’t think it’s moved to Wednesday yet. Neil: Anyway, before we started working on it I had Chris’s demo and I thought, “I’ve got to write a lyric about Thursday”. I went out jogging, in classic fashion, and thought, ‘“Thursday, then Friday… it’s soon going to be the weekend!’ — God, it’s like a real pop lyric.” I’m always impressed when I come up with something utterly banal because I think it’s a very di??cult thing to come up with. We sang that in the studio quite early on, and then it was decided to have spokenbits. Chris: Stuart had put in this great breakdown bit — not a new bit, but a breakdown — and we thought it would be great to have a rap. So we Googled Nicki Minaj and found an a cappella of hers and it sounded absolutely fantastic on the track — that was just to see what a rap would sound like. Around then we stopped working with Stuart for a while and he was doing some demos with Example, so Stuart got in touch and said: “I’ve got Example in the studio — a rapper!” Example was keen to do it, but he also wanted to sing. So on those terms we agreed -— he sang a different chorus melody that he came up with, and a rap. Neil: It’s our most unsually structured song since “What have I done to deserve this?”, I think. Or maybe one of the Xenomania ones. Before Example got involved I’d put in the spoken verses which were written on the hoof in the studio. That became “don’t say it’s over, over” though originally it was another lyric. That suddenly sounded very haunting and we liked that, and also again, with Stuart’s good vocal-speaking effect, it wasn’t embarrassing saying things like “romantic… I need some meaning… expressed with feeling…” I was very much not being me, saying that. Chris: Then I did chorus B: “It’s Thursday night…” Neil: My chorus melody, the first one, was “Thursday, then Friday…” Example came in and did, “I never tried to make you walk into the deep end…” and then we decided to link it all in because we were worried that the whole thing didn’t sit together and that there should be a chorus melody that re?ected Example’s sung melody, so I tried to sing my lyrics using Example’s sung melody, which ended up as, “It’s Thursday night, let’s get it right, I want to know you’re going to stay for the weekend.” Chris: So this song has actually got three choruses. Neil: At that point we were going to dump the original chorus, but there was a sense of longing in it. Then, when I wasn’t in the studio, Chris put on the classic list of days. Chris: You’d literally just gone through the door. Stuart liked that idea. I did it and then of course instantly regretted it. Neil: One of the reviews of the album mentioned “the sheer joy of Chris Lowe reciting a list”. Chris: Actually, one of the highlights of having done that was we had dinner with Stuart, Angela and Brandon Flowers, and on the steps of the restaurant on the way out he sang to me the spoken bit of “Paninaro”. Neil: “You, you’re my lover…” Chris: To me! It was a bit weird. Actually it was a great moment. I really enjoyed it. And then someone else, the other day, went to me “Thursday. . . Friday. . .” Neil: People often say to me, “Who did the speaking bit on that?” and I go Example and they go, “No no i no no. . .” Chris: Who said that the other day? Neil: Oh, I’ll tell you who it was! It was the guy who plays the nasty butler in Downton Abbey. He’s actually from Manchester. “No no no, ‘Thursday… Friday…”’ It’s a very good hook. That also pulled everything together. There were a ‘ lot of structural discussions going on with this song, emails with suggested structures, and then suddenly it ended up sounding great. Chris: We also thought about what Kool & the Gang might do at one point. That led to, “It’s Thursday night / let’s get it right.” Like “Ladies Night”. Because once we realised it was a party record, it was, “What would Kool and the Gang do in this situation?” Neil: In the song what’s happening is that there’s a guy — it could be the same guy as “Love is a bourgeois construct” — and his girl?iend. Or is she his girlfriend? I think they’re breaking up. But he doesn’t really want to break up. I’ve noticed that in a lot of my songs women are always ruthless and decisive and men are always pathetic. Anyway, the ruthless woman has had enough and he’s having a last ditch attempt at keeping her: “It’s Thursday night, let’s get it right… come on, stay for the weekend, oh go on.” He’s sort of admitting they could break up: “It could be now, it could be tomorrow, don’t say it’s over, over.” So it’s a “please don’t break up” song. Chris: I hear that lyric completely differently. To me it’s: “The party’s not going to ?nish… don’t say it’s over… because it’s not going to end.” As Miley Cyrus said, “We can’t stop, and we won’t stop.” It’s how you can get a completely different meaning. Neil: Example’s part is a guilt thing: “Take that trip down memory lane…” He is the guilty boyfiend, looking at it from Sunday morning. He’s been out on Friday, all day Saturday, all night Saturday and come back on Sunday morning. Chris: He’s creeping in. Neil: He’s trashed, doing that Sunday morning creeping. There’s a great line he wrote: “I want to stay but I must row that boat home.” So maybe it’s like a Richard Curtis ?lm where there are two separate stories, two strands to the ?lm — the Neil Tennant one and the Example one. They’re both in the same ?lm, and the turn’s called Thursday. “Vocal” Neil: “Vocal”’was not only written from Elysium but in my memory was almost the ?rst song written for Elysium. Chris: In Berlin. I can’t quite remember. I think Neil was playing something and I was playing some chords simultaneously. I think there was just a groove going round and round and round, and I was putting those chords on. Neil: I hadthe lyric, which was meant to be a sort of joke about dance music to begin with. Chris: When we ?nished it, we went out, and when we came back we played it one a loop, thinking, “How great is this song! We’ve got a hit!” It was a bit of a mess at that point, a bit all over the place, but that was quite exciting. Neil: I had the lines that went, “I like the singer / he’s lonely and strange / Every track has a vocal / and that makes a change.” Chris: It had brass lines and all sorts. Neil: It was more song-y, the demo. Chris: Then we worked on this track with Andrew Dawson. Neil: For a while I wanted to call the Elysium album Vocal. But we didn’t work on it that much with Andrew and it never really… There’s a mix, but it was never really a ?nished mix. Chris: Andrew’s forte wasn’t really the four-on-the-?oor stuff that Stuart has an innate understanding of. We knew that “Vocal” had to be an anthem. Neil: Yeah. And the stakes had been raised because this was a dance album. In some ways one of the main reasons we were doing a dance album is because we had “Axis” and we had “Vocal” — We knew we had two really great dance tracks. Chris: And then it was the last song to get ?nished for Electric, because we were working alphabetically, and Stuart sent over what he had done and it was so house-y and ravey. Neil: I was slightly shocked when I first heard it. He’d stripped it right back. Because Chris’s brass line part on the demo gave it a kind of moving quality that was taken out, though now it’s moving in a different way. Chris: Stuart gave it such euphoria. Neil: He dragged it into the twenty- first century. Chris: Stuart made this probably the most euphoric piece of music we’ve ever produced. Neil: It’s a tribute to the song and to his arrangement of it that on the first night of the tour proper in Chile, at the dress rehearsal the day before, Chris demanded that we didn’t do “Go West” as the final encore, we did “Vocal”. I was a bit nervous about this, partly because the structure of it is a little bit random. But it went down really great. It just worked. And that was two months before the album came out. It kind of winds up the album by summing up what the whole thing is about. The song became about something I didn’t personally participate in, but I’ve heard enough about it — the rave scene — but also my own memories. One of the main inspirations was remembering being on a dance?oor in Brazil during the Discovery tour — Chris and Literally were there too —~ and it was just totally great, and a lot of other memories like that, being on a dance?oor, the sense of community. I like the story that emerges, too, of the singer who is lonely and strange. Chris: Originally it was a DJ. Neil: No, it went, “I like the DJ / I like the song,” but I decided I didn’t want to pay homage to the DJ so I made it “the people”. Chris: For a while it was “these people”. Neil: Yes. I decided that sounded stupid. It’s funny how you can struggle over the most simple phrase for months. Years even, in this instance. But it’s a great end to the album. And the show. Chris: It’s great that we started the show with the ?rst track on the album and ended the show with the last track on this album.   “POPPY” Neil: The most experimental track on the album. I always think that on the vinyl Version “Shouting in the evening” should be at the start of side two. It was written during the Elysium sessions.