House of Cards

Hello.

Previously in my very long and rather dull series of comments about tracks, I have told you rather more than you actually wanted to know about things that you probably weren't very interested in anyway.

I lost track of what I wanted to say during that sentence, so if you can tell me what it was about, please do get in touch. The next sentence is quite improbable, as well.

So around 1997, both of us wrote songs about helium. We mangled the two together very badly, and ended up with an appallingly bad track called Free Helium Balloon. This is one of those highly improbable coincidences, which you might think would only happen the once.

Until early 2002, when I wrote a song called House of Cards. Which is exactly the same name of a song which Simon had started four years earlier, and had never told me about.

This time, we learnt our lessons and sensibly kept the two tracks entirely separate.

Anyway... this is a song about the state of the world in early 2002, and it tells a true story. Like all good students, I spent many a whole night talking complete nonsense about the state of the world until the sun started to rise.

In retrospect, the time between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq war was a slightly strange period. Some people agreed with the Afghanistan war; others disagreed, but at the time there seemed to be some degree of hope: a country had been liberated from an appalling regime; and terrorists were being rounded up across the country. In the UK, we still had some civil liberties, and everything seemed reasonably hunky dory.

All of this comes across quite nicely in the lyrics: there are lines such as "The sand is washed away, and who is right today?" or "... you wonder who is right, and why they fight". There's a wonderful line about the way we view history: "The faces of tomorrow stare like people who were there"; and there's even a little dig at what we were doing: "Sitting in comfort, we fought for freedom and peace".

As with many of the older Dusk b-sides, it is a song which has been through several different phases: it started off life sounding almost appallingly 80s; we tried to remix it to sound less dated, but failed entirely; and eventually ended up with the version which would appear as a b-side on the Bulletproof single.

So all in all, this is a song which I'm pretty proud of. It sounds like something from our Empires era, and honestly I have no idea why it took so long to get released, but I'm pretty proud nonetheless.