Songfacts®:

• Having experimented with eight-track recording on his previous album Hooverdam (2008), ex-Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell went full steam ahead with the back-to-basics approach on his 2012 album Totem and Taboo, produced by Nirvana and PJ Harvey collaborator Steve Albini, with the title track putting down the marker in terms of sound and lyrical content. "Strangely enough this was the last track I wrote for the album, but it's become one of my favourites" says Hugh on the track description on his official website. He goes on to describe it as "A hint of 'Rebel, Rebel' with some Marc Bolan glam thrown in. I've always like songs with the marching 4's on the snare, and that's what it is supposed to be, a rallying call for like-minded souls. I was playing this live most of last year (2011) so it went down easily enough in the studio."
• The song features the lyric "dropped off the radar and woke up two decades later," which can easily be interpreted as a caustic comment on his solo career post leaving The Stranglers in 1990. In an interview with thisiscornwall.co.uk, Hugh confesses that "It's an admission I've been falling on my arse for the last 20 years, trying to get my career going from the shadow of The Stranglers. I was branded by The Stranglers as if I was in an old John Wayne movie. It has clouded people's perception of what I've been doing since."
  
  Indeed, the chorus line of "what's totem for me is taboo for you" could be interpreted as a summation of Hugh's outlook on life and lyrics; from his very earliest days with The Stranglers, the band's lyrical content often courted controversy.
• The title comes from a collection of essays by renown psychologist Sigmund Freud published in 1913, where the father of psychoanalysis tried to explore the conflicts between primitive feelings and the demands of the civilization we live in. Sigmund Freud believed that human beings are guided by primitive instincts, especially sexual and aggressive. The most part of his studies are dedicated to sexual instincts. The first essay from the collection,Totem and Taboo is one more study dedicated to sexual life of human beings.