A Bad Dream - "A Bad Dream is the most emotional song on the record. It was
based on a poem by W.B.Yeats, called "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", and
I think it also came from visiting lots of battlefields and graveyards and so
in France, which sounds very morbid, but that's the kind of thing I like to do
on holiday! I've just always been really affected by... I guess still being a
relatively young man, I still have a lot of empathy of people of my age and
even younger, who are going off to war; and I guess the idea of going off to
war has been in the air for the last couple of years, with Afghanistan and Iraq
particular. Those seem like very distant things, but I think in Europe in
particular the Second World War is still something that still looms quite
largely in a lot of people's minds, and it certainly should do. I'd also been
reading a book called "The New Confessions" by William Boyd, in where the
protagonist of the book goes up in a hot air balloon to film the front line,
and he gets shot down and captured. It just made me think a lot of people when
they go off as young men, and when they come back - even if it's a couple of
years later it's like they've become old, and all the things they left behind
have changed. And it's something that you can never ever go back to being young
again. And I guess it's just a very sad song.

We wanted to get a balance between a kinda dream sequence - it starts very
quietly, and I love the idea of being in a plane, like a Spitfire or something,
being so high up in the sky that you can't hear the guns below you and so on.
And it's almost got a serene silence which is what this Yeats poem seemed to
really express. The song starts very quietly, but it gets huge and angry as it
goes on - the big distorted washy piano sound in the middle is a pretty vast
sound and it's I guess an attempt to express all that anger bursting out." -
Tim - Podcast 3 (30th May 2006)