Songfacts®:

• This six-minute track recounts the story of a working-class youth who dared to dream big. A good-looking boy, he was captain of his football team, and promised much.
  
  He played football
  Boy, could he play
  A scout from Crewe Alexandra came to watch him once
  And they said they were gonna be in touch
  
  "Tall Poppies" is a grim reality check that most of us don't live the life we want. "It's a statement on how people are told to be fully formed by 16," said vocalist James Smith to NME. "You're meant to know how your life's gonna play out. These landmarks are put in place for us by society and we're judged if we don't meet them. For a lot of people from working-class backgrounds, football trials are a way out of the mundane. It's a really ruthless system; it gets kids' hopes up and then spits them out."
  
  Smith added that some kids at his school were drafted into major football teams, but after a couple of poor games, "they're working on a building site by the time they're 20."
• "Tall Poppies" takes us through the man's life, including relationships, jobs and eventual death. It draws on Smith's youth in the Cheshire village of Lynn. "Effectively, on one way I could have gone if I hadn't left the village," he explained to Mojo magazine. "That stuff kind of shapes you and I don't think you realize that unless you're forced too - or you decide to write a really long song about it."
• The song started with Ryan Needham's simple bassline, which he looped and sent to Smith. "There was something about the motor of the bassline," Smith recounted to Apple Music. "The first thing I got from it was that it felt quite reflective and suspensive. Off the back of that, I had that spark for telling the story of this person's whole life, from cradle to grave."