Songfacts®:

• Allen Toussaint was a highly influential American musician, songwriter, arranger, and record producer who significantly shaped the sound of New Orleans R&B and funk from the 1960s onward. His piano playing was as smooth as a perfectly mixed Sazerac, his arrangements as meticulously crafted as an old wrought-iron balcony in the French Quarter. Toussaint worked with just about everyone who mattered and remained an active, vital force in music right until his passing in November 2015, aged 77.
  
  Among the many people he influenced was James Dean Bradfield, who met Toussaint in 2011 and never quite forgot it. That encounter was the inspiration for "Being Baptised."
• Bradfield described "Being Baptised" to NME as a "postcard from the past" about a day spent in the company of the great man.
• Toussaint's wisdom and sheer presence clearly left a huge impression, though Bradfield stops short of detailing the meeting in the song itself. Instead, the lyrics capture something more elusive - an air of reflection, a sense of transformation:
  
  I woke up soaked to the bone
  Was I being drowned or baptised?
  
  It's a classic Manics move - taking a deeply personal experience and turning it into something poetic, philosophical, and just a little cryptic.
• Manic Street Preachers recorded "Being Baptised" for their 15th album, Critical Thinking. While bassist Nicky Wire is the band's primary lyric writer, Bradfield penned the words for three tracks - his biggest lyrical contribution to a Manics LP.