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"This is a demo for a project with Paul Daley. It didn’t fit the direction, so we put it aside, but I think it still has legs. Songs tend to be accumulations of fragments that come together in an unconscious rush and it’s fun to unravel some of these afterwards

This one was kicked off by seeing a B movie - ‘Robot Monster’, when I was seven years old, made by Phil Tucker, maverick film maker of the 1950s. (Check a great film about Ed Wood, who worked in a very similar way. It stars Johnny Depp - in one of his best roles).
‘Robot Monster’ is often voted the worst movie of all time. I think it’s actually a surrealist masterpiece - a collage of scraps of stock footage and borrowed Hollywood props. No plot. The Monster is an ape suit with a diver’s helmet and stuck-on antennae. I watched it with awe.

Some other fragments of the song - an ex-girlfriend who hated Sci-fi and asked me not to bring back any more old movies I’d discovered. The psychiatric idea of projection taken literally.
Then there’s the image from a Ray Bradbury story ‘The Illustrated Man’, which I misread as ‘The Illuminated Man’ - (mistakes can be useful). And a weird lyric from a 1950’s song ‘I’ve got you under my skin.’
The song also references that strange feeling you get after an all-nighter in some dark club. You wander out into daylight and normality looks like another world - and a very strange one.

There are lots of other bits in there, too - and that’s why I can easily sympathise with Ed Wood’s plundering and collaging, somewhere between high art and low theft. That’s what songwriting really is."
John Foxx

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