Messed Up Kids

Album: Shangri La (2013)
Charted: 71
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Songfacts®:

  • Bugg wrote this song in Nashville with Raconteurs singer and guitarist Brendan Benson. It finds him singing about returning home to Clifton, Nottingham after all his success. "That song is written from a different perspective of going back," Bugg told The Sun. "When I go back to Clifton the main concerns are money and finding ways to pay bills and buy things, It was just very strange for me after all that's happened."

    "There's a lot of guilt," he added. "Why should I be able to go to all these lovely places? The more you start earning and the better you do it seems the more people want to give you things. I've been given clothes, an expensive Ralph Lauren leather jacket. I'm hardly going to say no. I buy things and people ask, 'Why did you buy it?' It's simple. Because I wanted to and because I now can."
  • Bugg said in the lead up to making Shangri-La that he wouldn't be able to write about the council estates and characters of Nottingham any more now that he's touring the world and selling thousands of albums. While this is true for the majority of the album, this song finds him singing about teenage drug dealers and prostitutes in his home town. "I'll never forget where I'm from," he told NME. "I'm speaking about it from a place that I really knew, but now I'm on the outside looking in. There's a feeling of guilt involved that people live like that and that's the way it is. People living on this estate and trying to make a living and there I am. I got to live my dream."

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