Double Trouble

Album: What the World Needs Now… (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song about relationships arose from an argument between frontman John Lydon and his wife, Nora Forster, over some plumbing. Seems one of their toilets had broken, and they needed it fixed - an issue that can lead to significant domestic disquiet.

    In our interview with Lydon, he explained: "I wanted to accurately portray how a domestic issue can be blown out of all proportion, but it can also be resolved - i.e., we got a plumber in, rather than an analyst."
  • The impetus for this song was a riff that the band's guitarist, Lu Edmonds, came up with. When Lydon heard this "beautiful little angry sort of pattern," he thought of the toilet repair scenario and wrote the lyric to match.
  • Lydon calls this a "happy song" and says that he and his wife laugh when they hear it. "It reminds us just how ridiculous rows can be," he told us. "But oddly enough, they're very important at the time, because you free up your mind of all that debris you might be hanging onto. So the idea in life is to really be as transparent as possible, and to get all that stuff out, and then laugh at how idiotic you sound when you say it."

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