Hamburg Song - "Hamburg Song was written in America - I seem to remember
writing it on a guitar in the back of the bus. But the first time we ever got
together and did a demo of it, was in Hamburg on a tour last year [it was
2004].We had a really great day - it was the first time we'd done any work on
any new songs and we had a day off so we went into a studio and just worked on
some new demos, and Hamburg Song was one of them. It was just labelled on the
tape box as "Hamburg Song" and we never got round to changing it. Somehow the
name seemed to fit really well with the song.

Lyrically I guess it's about... again, it's a bit like Atlantic, it's about a
fear of what we've got slipping away and I guess it's a plea just to remember
what a great thing it is to have a bond between people. And even if you all go
off and you do different things and you make different friends and have all
these adventures as people do - it's just a plea that at the end of it all
you're still the backstop in someone's life, as it were.

When we demoed it up, we did it very very simply, and then started to play it
live a little bit and we played it very very simply, and Tom's just playing an
organ on it. And there was definitely a temptation to turn it into this big
ballad, and we just felt ... we actually tried it; we thought we better try it,
so we tried putting some drums on it, and that song is all about atmosphere -
in fact the whole record, the most important thing was to capture an
atmosphere. And we just felt that the best way to do that with Hamburg Song was
the way that we'd done it to start off with, which was really really stripped
back and simple, so we kept it that way." - Tim - Podcast 3 (30th May 2006)

"Hamburg Song is definitely about a particular feeling of... You don't want
someone's attention all the time, you don't want to be the star of the show all
the time, but you just wanna be the kind of... what they consider to be their
home. Even though you might only get a small proportion of their attention and
time, they consider that small portion of time to be the most precious and the
bit they look forward to the most. I guess it's about feeling that you're not
really asking very much." - Tim - Strangers DVD