Chris It's very rave. House piano.

Neil We wrote the music for this in Glasgow, hence the guitar. I'd also bought a wah-wah pedal. On the finished record we had Johnny Marr playing the guitar. We felled around for ages with the song because we couldn't work out how to make it work. Originally it had more words - the lines were longer -and I thought it sounded naff. I also tried to do a rap. Then I realised I could make it shorter and we could use the 'oco's. We had a copy of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On in the studio - we always have a point in the album where we say, 'Let's make it like Marvin Gaye'. We realised there was something really good about having two voices doing different things at the same time, but I have never been very good at doing the other thing, so we got Jay Henry who had sung on the previous tour to sing on it. I'm also singing all the way through in low and high octaves together. We got the Banalescu Quartet to play on it. During our Derek Jarman tour they were the support Act and at the first concert they played, astonishingly, Shostakovitch's Eighth String Quartet to the whole bemused audience.

Chris It wasn't my idea.

Neil This is one of my songs about Russia. I had been reading this book by Ian MacDonald about Shostovokitch and I was just fascinated by the idea that all artists in the Soviet Union used to produce official works of art to commemorate the October Revolution, and therefore that all composers had written an October Symphony, celebrating the great achievements of the October Revolution. and then when the whole thing collapsed, and those values were regarded as worthless, people were left with these works of art that were valueless. Shostakovitch's were revealed as actually being in opposition to the regime and all having a subtext of opposition to communism in them. I was just thinking of some composer looking at their October Symphony and wondering how they could salvage it. The verses are explaining what's happening in Russia: it's all very confusing, because they used to march in October, 'so shall I rewrite or revise my October Symphony- change the dedication from revolution to revelation?'

The composer is wondering whether, by just changing two letters, you could sort of claim that you'd never believed in the revolution anyway. He's someone who has compromised to survive. The song mentions different revolutionary periods in Russian history. It asks, 'Shall we worry about February?' because the February Revolution was the first revolution in 1917, the middle class parliamentary democracy revolution which was overturned by the Bolsheviks. November was the end of the First World War. December was when there was the famous Decembrist Conspiracy. The October Revolution -which happened in November because the Russian calendar is different - was the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Or; as we now say, the Bolshevik coup d'etat. In a way, the song is really about confusion. When three generations have been brought up to believe in

a strict ideology and suddenly the ideology is abolished, you don't really know what to think to any more. I always felt that pop songs should be able to be about contemporary life, and these changes in Russia were a very powerful thing that was happening, that was changing the word at the time. But also it's a song about music. Consequently in it we have quite an interesting mix of musical styles: it's quite rave, it has this Marvin Gaye thing going on, and at the same time it has this very classically-arranged string quartet. The end always reminds me of Yellow Submarine, where they go to Peppering