Songfacts®:

• The second single from Manic Street Preachers' 1998 album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours found bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire struggling to come up with a good title. After spending some time trying to think of something similar to Blur's "The Universal" or Joy Division's "The Eternal," he eventually borrowed from a poem by his brother Patrick Jones titled "The Everlasting."
• Wire explained to Q magazine the youthful idealism gone sour line - "in the beginning when we were winning." Said the Manic's lyricist: "I was tired. I'd got to my little house, I was reading (grumpy Welsh poet) RS Thomas and thinking how comfortable things were, but how things might be getting too big."
• The single reached #11 on the UK Single Charts, breaking the band's run of five consecutive top ten hits.
• The song's music video was filmed at Euston railway station in London and was censored due to the fact that it contained people on fire. As a result a second version was produced without the computer generated flames.