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"It's Really Easy To Sound Like A Complete Idiot"
Simon Toulson-Clarke of Red Box tries to make sense of  For America 

"It's so tiresome explaining songs. It's so much more fun to let people decide what it means themselves. And it sounds so pretentious if you've made a pop song and you start explaining 'political' meanings. It's really easy to sound like a complete idiot.

"It is about America but it's more about the impression we get of America here than America itself. It was written at the time of the Libyan bombings, which was an outrage, so it's quite a negative look at America and Americans because in some ways I just think we're an aircraft carrier for America. I actually went to America for the first time since I wrote it and it's a pretty frightening place. Nothing had prepared me for the sheer commercialism. Every surface carries advertising; everything that moves carries advertising. There's also a kind of inbuilt success snobbery and most of the people come across as brash and quite insincere.

"Part of the song is also about us making records 'for America' -- the first line means 'stop and think about pop music'. At the time we were under a lot of pressure to make our album sound like it would sell a lot of copies in America which we resisted for what we thought were the best reasons -- because everybody seems to make similar sounding records and we just wanted a bit of individual character in what we're doing. They wanted us to put a big drumkit on the song and make it like 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World'. It amuses me so much that they were trying to do to the song exactly what the song was saying. I find that ludicrous. I don't think the record company understand that -- I don't think the record would be out if they had.

"I think it's great though that the chorus doesn't say anything. I'd write everything in meaningless words if I could, to be honest. I love those sort of phonetic songs. It is first and foremost a pop song and if you like it you should enjoy it and maybe buy it; if you don't, then don't let it ruin your day."

[ end ]

[ go to the scanned version ]

Trivia

-from circa 1986.

-the pictures accompanying the article are from the set of the For America promotional video.

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