No Reptiles by Everything Everything

Album: Get To Heaven (2015)

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This song was written in response to some of Everything Everything vocalist Jonathan Higgs' friends becoming conspiracy theorists and believing that the world's leaders are actually destructive lizards. "The true horror is that they are not evil masterminds," he told NME. "They are just idiots - that's much scarier than reptiles."
Jonathan Higgs sings here, "I'm going to kill a stranger." The vocalist insisted to Q magazine that he's singing in character. "You can be far more audacious as a persona. You'd get thrown off an aeroplane if you said that. But I wanted that feeling that I'm completely detached and you don't know what I'm gonna do."
Everything Everything's Alex Robertshaw recalled his initial impression of this song to Digital Spy: "I remember speaking to Jon after he'd [written] it and I said how it reminded me of Nick Cave and he said, 'oh, I'm glad'. That's what he was going for, that kind of character driven-thing, where you can actually be this obtuse, horrible person, but it's not you – you're just trying to explain a story or explain a mood or a fragment of time."
Jonathan Higgs wrote the song at a time when he was feeling quite separate from society as a whole. He explained to The Line Of Best Fit: "I was feeling quite hateful towards my own country and my own place in the world, and feeling like I didn't really like Britain or what it stands for. I don't necessarily feel like that all the time, but I do sometimes."

"The song has this theme of fat pouring down the streets and clogging every hole - that's how I was feeling about the general public, me included," Higgs added. "We're just this blobby, inactive, privileged, big, pale blob, and I wanted to use this metaphor of this massive fat-tsunami washing through the city streets and going into the gutters. That was how I felt; it was how I felt about a big do-nothing society that hadn't changed. It all comes back to being fat really... it's like one of the things that you just see; I'm kind of fat, and I don't like that about myself."

Comments: 1

Ethan from Bonita, California UsCan I tell you, that I hear a fight against suicide in this song as well... could that play into this at a sub level as well?

I was struck by the lines, “I’m going to kill a stranger” and then driving into a plea to be “wise enough to know myself”

This idea is so profound that it is resonating within my bones. That in some cases acts of suicide can be the killing of a stranger...

I hope we can all be wise enough to find ourselves!

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