One More Time

I [...] worked on a song called ‘One More Time’, with a driving guitar riff and anguished lyrics about the end of a relationship. The guy can’t believe the girl wants to leave: tell me one more time, he says, one more time, one more time. I’d taken a little piece of my breakup with Jill, one moment, one feeling, and embellished it into something else. I guess that’s how fiction works: not creating something false, but creating new truths out of bits of old ones. Just as we create new music by endlessly reshuffling the same old chords and scales.

— A Cure for Gravity, 1999

Sunday Papers

There was a song, for instance, called ‘Sunday Papers’ in which I had the guitar play reggae ‘chops’ on two and four, while the bass and drums played a funk rhythm underneath, technically at half the tempo.

— A Cure for Gravity, 1999

Is She Really Going Out With Him?

There were about three different ideas that went into it. One was that I heard The Damned doing ‘New Rose’ and it starts off with ‘Is She Really Going Out With Him?’, and I thought ‘Where have I heard that before?’, and it was on that Shangri-Las record ‘Leader of the Pack.’ I thought that that was a pretty good title for a song, and it appeared to me that it should be a song about gorgeous girls walking around with really hideous blokes and obviously it was going to be a humorous song.

— interview in Beat Instrumental (UK), Oct. 1979

People still occasionally tell me that this song is the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m certainly not ashamed of it, and I thank them, but I have to admit I sincerely hope they’re not right.

— A Cure for Gravity, 1999

Happy Loving Couples

Take ‘Happy Loving Couples’. What that song isn’t is taking a slap at easy targets: let’s-knock-marriage. It’s easy to knock. If I haven’t got a girlfriend and he has then he’s a cunt. There’s the line wanna be really wanna be what my friends pretend to be – all these couples who pretend to be so happy; maybe their relationship isn’t as good as what I want. It’s saying that I don’t want a false relationship.

— interview in New Musical Express (UK), 10 Feb. 1979

Throw It Away

... and a new [song] called ‘Throw It Away’ which was basically a high-energy thrash.

— A Cure for Gravity, 1999

Look Sharp!

‘Sharp’ – that was what I wanted to be, how I wanted my music to sound, how I wanted to look – you could be sharp even in clothes from Oxfam; it was all about attitude. I tried to sum up the attitude in a song called ‘Look Sharp’, and I thought it might be a good title for the album, too.

— A Cure for Gravity, 1999

Fools In Love

The only really bitter song there is ‘Fools In Love’. It’s about when you split up with your girlfriend and you think what a load of shit all that turned out to be.

— interview in New Musical Express (UK), 10 Feb. 1979

Meanwhile I rebelled against the schmaltz by writing a song called ‘Fools in Love’. Over a loping reggae bass line which I hoped was vaguely sinister, I catalogued all the sick and deluded things that lovers did to each other, but ended each chorus with a twist: ‘I should know because this fool’s in love again’. I wasn’t in love, but the juxtaposition of the romantic and the cynical suited my new style to a T.

— A Cure for Gravity, 1999