Songfacts®:

• This bittersweet track is from Postcards From a Young Man, the 10th studio album by the Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers. The song pairs the voices of Manic's vocalist James Dean Bradfield and Echo & the Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch.
• According to the NME, bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire went for this song with such intensity that he literally grounded a tooth out of his head fretting over this song's musical arrangement.
• The music video features Bradfield and McCulloch walking around their home cities of Cardiff and Liverpool.
• The song peaked at #44 on the UK singles chart, and was the first single from the band to not to make the Top 40 since they signed to Sony in 1991. Nicky Wire admitted to Absolute Radio: "I was quite distraught that 'Some Kind of Nothingness,' our single, missed the Top 40. I was gutted."
  
  The bassist added that he still takes a keen interest in the charts, but usually finds it a stressful listening experience when concerning his own music. "My excitement always turns into a real dose of fear when I'm waiting for a chart position or to find out whether the radio's going to play our record," he said. "It's like waiting for that envelope to drop through the door and see you've got a D in geography."
• Keith Cameron writes in 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure: A History of Manic Street Preachers that in preparation for his contribution to the song, Ian McCulloch asked for "two packs of Marlboro Red, two pints of milk – full fat, none of that World War Two s--t – and a bottle of Courvoisier."