Black Volcanic Sand

Blacktop

Minibar

• Simon: The worst song I've ever written, and that's saying something. The conceit was that I was full of many different kinds of over-priced alcohol. It contained a reference to Ready Brek, a form of breakfast cereal that looks and tastes like pig slurry. Performed on the opening night of L!VE TV, July '94, to an audience of hundreds, and ditched forever. Only the name lives on.

The Secret Life of Benny Hill

• Released on Em One in February 1997
  Editor/publisher Karl Sinfield's notes on "The Secret Life of Benny Hill": "Unbelievable tune. Utterly addictive. Better than sex, and longer lasting, at two and a half minutes. If I ever get a song half this good again, I'll be the happiest small-press publisher in the world. With the possible exception of Rupert Murdoch."
• Simon: This got two outings on TV: the afore-mentioned debacle at Canary Wharf, and a short-lived London based show called The Warehouse, sometime in 1996. I gave the rights to it to Mick Frangou, erstwhile Minibar drummer, for his twenty-sixth birthday. His is still to this day trying to sell it to Robbie Williams. It's that kind of song.
• Simon: "Benny Hill began as a story inspired by my first two attempts at being a best man; in my role as the devilish rogue, making the crowd laugh with embarrassing anecdotes about the groom, I rather over-stepped the mark. I liked the idea of the Best Man's speech being accusatory, his old friend is taking shelter in the conformity of marriage, ("life in the middle lane"), and the best man is using the situation to tell his gathered friends and family that "the secret life of Benny Hill has got nothing on my best friend". Benny Hill, as well as being entirely over-rated by everybody except the English, was a known coprophiliac. Enjoy!"

Bad In Bed

• Simon: Actually, this is the worst: a turgid sub-Gallagher dirge I never want to hear again. Recorded April '96, by Julian Standen, our then Manager/Producer , a week after Sid had joined the band, and so before he had had time to tell us that it was crap.

My Celebrity Friend

• Simon: Based on the thrill of seeing Neil Tennent of The Pet Shop Boys on the tube, and being unable to think of anything to say that wasn't lame or stalky ('You have constructed a world where dance music is both wry and joyful.....I like your sunglasses'). It got the full Lightning Seeds treatment from Jules as he was quite rightly obsessed with getting us on the radio, but it was also quite crap, and therefore didn't.

Breakfast Of Champions

• Simon: Based on the book that was based on the cereal of the same name, this song was about Ecstasy. If it had been 140 bpm and gone 'Wheeee' every 10 seconds, it might have been a hit, but as it sounded like an Elvis Costello B-Side and went on about Tamazepam and a canned drink from the Seventies called Tizer, it wasn't.

Helium

• Simon: In contrast, this got played to death on GLR in 1995. It was our first demo with Jules, and we cheated on Gary Crowley's Demo Clash by voting for ourselves on speed-dial, ensuring four whole weeks of radio exposure. I still like this song 'cos it started the ball rolling, but deep it is not.

Child Film Star

• Simon: I really liked this one, and could never get why nothing much came of it. We recorded it at the Red Bus Sessions in London, Dec '98, but along with 35 other songs, it got turned down by Cherry.

Pneumonia

• Road Movies outtake
• Simon: Sid's sad tale of reckless youthful abandonment, where the protagonist gets drunk, goes to the seaside, goes in the sea, gets pneumonia. The coda where said protagonist nearly misses a Very Important Gig because he's nearly dead has been removed. Recorded in secret at Konk Studios (owned by the notoriously pliable Ray Davies of The Kinks) by a mad Irishman called Graham over the summer of '97, who then asked the band to come over and watch him destroy the master tapes. Personally, I didn't think it was that bad.

Makeshift Darkroom

• Road Movies outtake
• Co-written by Sid and Simon
• Simon: Almost a murder ballad, I suppose, so it didn't quite mesh with Cherry's idea of us as an Alt Country boy band, and thus got air-brushed out of our album, Stalin-style, when they mastered our album in secret. A horribly distorted version appears on our web-site. It deserved better, but then again, so did we.

My Girlfriend, A Piano, And Me

Gloria's Swan Song

Bittersweet

Supertanker

• Simon: Again recorded at Konk, but having survived the unhinged impulses of Graham the engineer, it fell foul of a far more terminal fate, the Sid Veto. Admittedly, it involves a very dodgy rhythm change and contains the line, 'I'm leaking money and my mouth is bleeding...'. We were still playing it when we first came here in Oct '98, but sadly never since.

Winter Coat

• Simon: Another of our bass player's favourites, this was a song I wrote about a winter coat. The fact that it was his coat apparently didn't help. Tim loves to play this one as it has a long and very rockin' guitar solo.

This Place Is A Mess

• Simon: I really love this one. Sid wrote it during the long lost weekend of the summer of '97. He played it to me one night and I wrote the second verse the next morning and posted it through his letter box before he woke up. This one may yet appear again.