Songfacts®:

• The Manchester Calling album is broadly inspired by commercial expansion in the city Paul Heaton calls home. Said Heaton: "Manchester is now being turned into a business center for the rich, which I can't stand. If there's a theme to the record, it's anti growth, anti greed, against the continuous tearing down of old buildings and sticking up soulless offices, and the disappearance of local accents on TV, along with the creeping spread of Americanese."
• The title track is a dystopian soundscape featuring multiple spoken voices in different accents, some Heaton and some his friends, passing savage sentence on a city.
  
  Half the size of London, slightly less than Brum
  Half the population with head lodged up its bum
  Now property developers look down on Northern scum
  And that's Manchester Calling
  
  Heaton explained to Q magazine: "I think Manchester's on a slightly different path now. By that, I mean maybe what's happening to the city center. I see it as just rampant capitalism. It's got a different swagger now to the other swagger that I quite like in Mancunians. It's not the swagger of Liam Gallagher. Now it's a swagger of big business."
• John Owen Williams produced the song along with the rest of Manchester Calling. A longtime Heaton collaborator, Williams produced both Housemartins albums and the previous three Paul Heaton & Jacqui Abbott long players.