Is There A Pill?

Album: Further (2019)
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Songfacts®:

  • Richard Hawley was inspired to write this grungy tune after someone very close to him killed himself. He has in the past referenced a cousin who committed suicide after coming off prescription drugs in 2013.
  • Because of its subject matter, this could have turned into a negative song, but Hawley told NME he penned it "to make myself and his family feel better."

    He added: "To try and turn it into something positive was almost impossible, but it's a lesson to us all. You've got to have respect for somebody when they make that ultimate decision. It was awful circumstances, but it was to do with the prescription medication that f---d his head up. It's a comment on our growing reliance on it."
  • Hawley has had his own bitter experience of prescription drugs. Back in 2012 at a gig, the singer slipped on a marble staircase while wearing leather-soled shoes and broke his leg. He spent the next month in a wheelchair on Tramadol. Hawley recalled: "When I broke my leg they put me on all of these mad-as-f--k pills. My wife is a mental health nurse and I discussed it with her at length."

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