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"...lyrics are funny things for they mean different things to different people, and one of the lyricists skills, I feel, should be to write in such a way that you don't necessarily prescribe exactly to the listener what they should be feeling. What I was thinking about when I wrote the lyrics to Seeing Red, is the tendency of some of us these days, including myself at the very least in the past tense, to live our lives too much online. In discussion forums we sometimes argue about things in a way that we would never do if we were just sitting with a bunch of people down the pub. This can become obsessive and so focused that we stop being able to see the bigger picture."
"It's also self-referential though - an injunction to myself to get back out into the world of writing and performing original material. I normally write lyrics longhand, but this one flowed out so fast, I had to go to the computer and type it straight out! The direct inspiration was a song I wrote a long time ago, asking 'Are the many shades of purple only me?'".
Rich Harding
"Oud En Nieuw refers to a habit I have of walking around the streets of my home town Bristol, towards the end of the year. I'm thinking about the things that have happened during the year: where did I come from and where I'm going. If there's Christmas music on - and there usually is - I also have a habit of twisting the lyrics of John Lennon's famous anti-war song to 'So this is Bristol, and what have you done?'. I'm a great believer in always having a plan, but always being flexible with it. You need to start walking to get anywhere, and sometimes where you get isn't where you intended to be, but you have to start the journey all the same."
"Specifically it recalls sitting in Utrecht (The Netherlands) with my girlfriend Sarah on what the English would call New Year's Eve, watching Chinese lanterns floating over the city, and realizing that the wind direction meant they would have been launched from near where I used to live. If I'd not unexpectedly and suddenly stopped living there, I wouldn't have been with Sarah in Utrecht watching them. So Oud En Nieuw is a much better title than, for instance, New Year's Eve because it sums the whole song up far more comprehensively. That's languages for you - direct translations don't always cut the mustard."
Rich Harding
"There are lots of things going on lyrically in that song! I enjoy writing songs that have two - sometimes more- threads going through them. From my point of view, the threads in Reality Cheque are about the illusions of fame and the perils of living on borrowed goods and money, both personally and as a country."
Rich Harding