Chris The title doesn't necessarily relate to the song.

Neil  Well, that was why we asked Johnny Marrto play on it. We thought it should have guitars because

Chris pictured it to be a jingly kind of guitar thing. On the demo he played the melody on a guitar sample. There's still a guitar solo played by Chris on the keyboard. This was always a very easy track. I'd written the words when it was demoed. The title comes from the title of the screenplay Joe Orton wrote for The Beatles which was never used. I needed a four-syllable phrase to fit the melody, and I looked at the bookcase in my sitting room and there was Up Against It. Having decided upon that title, I'd also been reading a book about London after the Second World War; and the lyrics are sort of about post-war Britain. It's about how people thought that they were going to build a new Jerusalem, and how in every era everyone's being told to tighten their belts. They were doing that in the Forties, in the Sixties, in the Seventies, in the Eighties, and they were still doing it when I wrote this. You're always marching but you're never actually getting anywhere. It always seems like there's an economic crisis on, and that optimism

disappears, and the song is saying: what a swizz. The first verse - 'such a cold winter' - refers to the legendarily cold winter of 1947/48. Rhyming 'Pinter' and 'winter' is very Sting, isn't it? The 'so deep in quicklime' part was triggered by the fact that, as I was writing the song, they dug up the bones of the Tsar and his family in Russia. It's just saying that communism was rubbish. The whole song is just saying that politics is rubbish.

Chris The bassline's doing a Latin rhythm bit.

Neil  Johnny Marr came up with the idea for the backing vocals at the end: 'coming up against it now, really coming up against it oooh whooo whooo'. He said, 'If you were being Quincy Jones you'd do something like this'. I said, 'Let's do that, then,' and we sang them together.

Chris We were still doing Sharon Redd breakdowns. No handclaps though.

Neil  It's got a very good end.