Songfacts®:

• This plea for nostalgia and comfort features a brooding, melancholic contribution from Richard Hawley. The Sheffield singer-songwriter told Gigwise that he and Manics frontman James Dean Bradfield clicked after they both contributed songs to Dame Shirley Bassey's 2009 album, The Performance. "I met James at that Shirley Bassey concert because we both wrote songs for her. I was sat at the side of the stage just watching her and completely in awe then James just came up and tapped me on the shoulder and we just sat together completely enthralled by Ms Bassey. We got chatting afterwards and it turns out that both of our fathers were first-wave teddy boy bikers. You don't meet many other people like that. It was a shared experience we had of growing up with people who were fairly fu--ing wild."
  
  "We swapped phone numbers," he continued," and texted each other occasionally, but he was off having a family and a break while I was away on the road, then he just phoned me and said, 'We've written this song and all decided that you have to sing it or it won't go on the album.' So I just said, 'I can't let you down,' and it was a great honour I drove down to Cardiff in a day and it's a really beautiful song. I play a bit of Hawaiian guitar on it and it's me and James doing a duet. He sings one part and I sing another.
  
  Nick (Wire, bass) wrote the words I sing and James wrote his bit, so it's a very personal song," Hawley concluded, "and I was surprised that Nicky wanted me to sing it, but now that I've done it I can see why. It's quite dramatic and acoustic."
• Manic Street Preachers bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire explained the song's meaning to The Quietus: "It's a tiny bit heartbreaking, that song, he said. 'I want to be small, lying in my mother's arms.' It's saying, 'I'd like to do it all again.' It's not about changing stuff because it's been fu--ing brilliant. That's hard to put into a lyric. I loved growing up, I loved being a kid, I love my Mum and Dad and my brother, and then I loved being in a band, and doing education in between. Being very blessed in a very simple way - there's no extravagances in those years. It's about realising it's fu--ing over, and that's what permeates the sadness."