Not Even Close

Two tracks on Dust were written way before any others, and, perhaps slightly strangely, they have ended up being the first and last tracks. There are probably a number of reasons for this, but I don't think any of them are particularly interesting.

So Not Even Close begins with a noise that's not too dissimilar to Goldfrapp's Ooh La La. This isn't intentional: Supernature hadn't come out yet when we first recorded this track. It was supposed to sound a bit like I Feel You from Depeche Mode's wonderful Songs of Faith and Devotion album. Never mind, the good ideas are always the most widely used.

It's a song about our (young people these days') disillusionment with British politics. You'll find all the obvious references in there, such as "we trusted your smile, not your lying eyes" and "there's no need to be truthful, or honour what you said". It isn't the first song we've written about this sort of thing - also check out No Man's Land on Zero and Down from Nemesis (admittedly the latter was rather less obvious, as the references to Major, Blair and Thatcher were removed, and the line "I wish I had hair like Michael Portillo" was replaced by "I wish I had hair like an armadillo", which makes much more sense).

Apparently the chords are the same as Not a Million Miles (off our last album Empires), but played backwards. We've done that before, as well. Proof, were it needed, that very little we do is actually original.

Latest news

We're currently working on the new single - the first from Dusk. This is the state of play at the moment:

• It will probably have four or five tracks
• We haven't decided what the a-side will be
• One of the b-sides might be My Light, unless we decide to do something else with it
  
• There might be a remix
  
• We know vaguely what the artwork will look like

... and that's about as far as we've got. We really seem to work very slowly these days.

We've got lots of b-sides (i.e. particularly rubbish tracks) to get rid of release, so there will probably be some more singles afterwards, too. And we're also contemplating doing something special at the end of the year - it is our fifteenth anniversary, after all!

Particularly observant readers might notice that I've been adding old news items to the bottom of this blog. I don't really know why - it just seems to make a nice archive of what we've been up to. I might add some more, if I find them.