Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Album: Lady's Bridge (2007)
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Songfacts®:

  • Richard Hawley wrote this song as a reaction to watching councilors congratulating themselves on the TV program Look North. He explained to NME they believed they were sorting out nuisance crime by giving out ASBOs. (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders were introduced by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998 and were designed to restrict bad behavior in some way, such as prohibiting a return to a certain area).

    Hawley added that the self-satisfied local council officials made him want to kick his television in because ASBOs haven't sorted out the root of the people's anti-social behavior. "It just imprisons people in their homes," he said. "It's successive government's cowardice of refusing to deal with why people actually behave like that."
  • The song features in The Simpsons episode "Exit Through the Kwik-E-Mart" during a montage of Bart painting graffiti in Springfield.

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