Hips And Lips

Album: The National Health (2012)
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Songfacts®:

  • Frontman Paul Smith explained this song to NME: "It's about two people at loggerheads. It builds up from an electronic pulse, to something I never thought I'd say about a Maximo Park song: it's got quite an 'industrial' chorus. It gets a 'Trent Reznor' in the middle."
  • The promo features This Is England actor Thomas Turgoose as a massive Maximo Park fan who sends them a video that he has made for the song.

    Smith told Spinner: "A lot of our videos have focused on the intensity of our performances and so this time we wanted to have a fun video undercut by a darker, more obsessive thread that gets introduced towards the end.

    The song is about a flashpoint in a relationship, but there's a playful side to the wordplay in the lyrics, so hopefully the video reflects that. Thomas Turgoose, who plays the super-fan, is in one of our favorite films, This Is England, so when people see the video, they might be thinking, 'Is this guy for real? Do I recognize him?"

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