Songfacts®:

• Chief lyricist and singer Jonathan Higgs explained the song's meaning to The Line Of Best Fit. "It's this idea of the cyclical nature of growing older and becoming jaded, or part of the establishment... becoming just like all your forefathers and making all the same mistakes," he said. "I used to be much more idealistic than I am now, and I worry that I'm caring less about other people and things like that. Neurotic bollocks [laughs]."
  
  "The verses deal with the fact that throughout time you always kings and paupers, mixed with some of the stuff that was happening in Israel last year with the children being killed on the beach and just how wrong that was," Higgs continued. "The end breakdown bit about the baboon is a paraphrasing of this 17th century insult - 'you are a thief and a murderer and you have stolen the face of a baboon', or something - and when I first read that, I just thought that it was the most weirdly specific insult. It sounds quite modern as well, I think, and if someone said that to me now, it'd mean just the same. The fact that such an old insult still has the same meaning now brought the whole idea of the song back to me in a very realistic way: things haven't really changed."
• Madonna and The Killers collaborator Stuart Price produced the track. Jonathan Higgs recalled to NME:
  
  "We would send him the tracks overnight to LA and he would send them back with little additions and stuff. The intro has a particularly stupid little bass noise that he put in. We were just pissing ourselves when we heard it. We were like 'there's no way that's serious' – but it was and it's on the album."
• Jonathan Higgs also directed the surreal music video. He recalled: "We all got together in a quarry in we had these UV cameras that detect all the sun damage and stuff on your face. I wanted to make a really oppressive sun in the video. We all dressed in silver suits to reflect it off in the video and it kind of looked like a Martian landscape. We just pissed around on all the equipment there and slapped each other with gloves, played the trumpet and had a really good time."
  
  Higgs added: "It had this really good look because our skin was all f--ked up and Jeremy's fake tooth shone black. We just all looked dreadful which I really enjoy doing to us."