Songfacts®:

• This was The Verve's first single since 1998, when they released "Sonnet." The band split in 1999, re-formed in 2007, then broke up again two years later.
• This was built round a loop which Richard Ashcroft lifted from another track on Forth, "Columbo."
• This song references William Blake's poem And did those feet in ancient time, which was later put to music by Sir Hubert Parry under the title of "Jerusalem." Ashcroft's lyrics include "Do those feet in modern times/Walk on soles that are made in China?" and also an allusion to "Bright prosaic malls" instead of the poem's "dark Satanic mills." The Verve's 1995 single "History" also borrowed lyrically from Blake, in this instance, it was the visionary poet's "London."
• Richard Ashcroft told the story of the song in an interview with BBC DJ Steve Lamacq. He said: "I was working a lot with a vocoder, an old vocoder I had in the studio and created the vocal loop and as soon as I had that vocal loop that was it."
  
  "I mean, there has been a few times in my career, or whatever you want to call it, where you know, you just know, that this is universal, this is like, given the chance, you know, if the world could hear it the world would get into it, and that's so rare I think when something within a few seconds can grab people."
  
  "Really, you know, lyrically in a way I think if you look at it as a sort of the first few lines a kind of re-make of Jerusalem by William Blake rather than will those 'feet in ancient times' it's the feet in modern times. It's 'bright prosaic malls' instead of 'dark Satanic mills', and again I think it goes back to that internal struggle of my own, you know, that search for the love and it's what we're all searching for, I think. That internal battle is the battle that I will always have lyrically perhaps or with my songs. It's about, perhaps, my own internal battle."
• This song, along with the rest of the album, was recorded in the State Of The Ark studio, which is owned by front man Richard Ashcroft's friend Terry Britten, who wrote Cliff Richard's 1976 hit "Devil Woman."