Songfacts®:

• Several of the songs on A Celebration of Endings appear to have been written as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the band actually completed the album months before the outbreak. Frontman Simon Neil told the BBC "The Champ" was written as a response to climate change, Brexit and the Scottish referendum, but its meaning subsequently "changed beyond recognition."
• The song finds Neil railing against the "grey man's curse" who never pipes up and ultimately loses "every little thing that you'd always cherished."
  
  "The best spies in the world just fade into the background," Neil told NME. "You don't even notice them in the room. That song was initially about climate change and the environment. Now that song, for me, is about the people who bite their tongues and keep their opinions to themselves when they should be heard."
• When reality has washed upon the shore
  You're always turning tables
  And always telling tales I should ignore
  
  The lyric is a reference to a 3-year-old Syrian refugee whose image made global headlines after his body washed up on the Turkish shore in 2015. "People had previously been like, 'F--k you refugee bastards!' and all of a sudden changed to, 'Oh, it's so sad. Look at this picture.' That song is about all these terrible things really coming home to roost," Neil explained. "Boris (Johnson) and that mob have been digging at experts for years. There are people who are often wrong but never in doubt. These people are running the world at the moment."
• Biffy Clyro recorded the song with the orchestra at Abbey Road Studio Two, which is where The Beatles famously recorded their music. Neil told Apple Music: "Whenever you hear an orchestra, [it comes from] a spark of an idea that starts in such a small place - normally me in the house playing my guitar - and then you fast-forward 10 months and you've got tons of wonderfully talented people playing it in this beautiful room."