Come to Daddy (Pappy Mix)

Album: Come to Daddy (1997)
Charted: 36
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Songfacts®:

  • The title track of Aphex Twin's Come To Daddy EP, this is one of the British electronic music artist's best-known songs. In October 2011, NME placed it at #42 on its list of "150 Best Tracks of the Past 15 Years."
  • Aphex Twin, aka Richard James, explained the story of this slice of industrial intensity with ghoulish lyrics to Index magazine: "Come to Daddy came about while I was just hanging around my house, getting pissed and doing this crappy death metal jingle," he recalled. "Then it got marketed and a video was made, and this little idea that I had, which was a joke, turned into something huge. It wasn't right at all."
  • James regards the finished article as too tame. "You do notice that you'll start to clench your fists and that's a good sign," he told Loaded. "But the clench factor wasn't tight enough for me."
  • The song was covered by The Dillinger Escape Plan on their 2002 EP with Mike Patton, Irony is a Dead Scene.
  • The track is heard twice in the Nicolas Cage film 8mm, when the vinyl record is played being in Machine's room and also on a TV screen in Dino Velvet's office.
  • The Chris Cunningham-directed music video shows childlike creatures, all of whom bear James' grinning face, pursuing an elderly lady, who then confronts a demon. The clip was filmed around the Thamesmead South housing estate, the same location where Stanley Kubrick shot many scenes for A Clockwork Orange.
  • Pitchfork named the urban nightmare clip #1 in their list of Top 50 Music Videos of the 1990s. They said: "Darkly comic and just plain dark, Chris Cunningham's tale of television unleashing hell in a dilapidated housing block plays like a gothic graphic novel, an ADD-riddled version of Village of the Damned, and an H.R. Giger-designed haunted house."

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