Walk The Walk

Album: World's Strongest Man (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • Here, Gaz Coombes sings about a trigger-happy political leader. Speaking to BBC's Music News LIVE, Coombes explained the song was inspired by "the idea of a kind of a dictator in his compound getting ready to push the big red button."

    He added: "It's based on anyone from Escobar to Peaky Blinders to Trump, that kind of male thing but in a fun caricatured way."
  • The basis of the track came from a loop. Coombes explained: "I mess around with a lot of beats and stuff and I like the hip hop approach to sections and sometimes I write in a different way and write some beats and start playing along on a glockenspiel or violin or something and the bass line started from that point."
  • When Gaz Coombes was on holiday in early 2017 he read Grayson Perry's autobiography The Descent of Man. The English contemporary artist's book is an exploration of masculinity in the 21st Century and it struck a chord with Coombes and inspired this song. The singer told Q Magazine:

    "(The book) touches on how the male identity is in trouble - how young men have this image of how they should be growing up, how success means having your own personal Trump Tower. He questions the people he speaks to, but he never judges them – they're just brought up to be tough guys."
  • "Walk the Walk" conjures up images of a Donald Trump-like character holed up in a compound, finger hovering over a big red button. "I didn't want it to be purely about him, cos there are enough other alpha male characters trampling over everything in front of them to get to the top," Coombes said. "It's a delusional existence, and at the same time it's a damaging one."
  • The song's imagery may have been influenced by Donald Trump's tweet about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his "bigger" nuclear button.

    Baby you're the one who can walk the walk
    She's got a finger on the button ready to delete


    Coombes told the BBC: "I think the lyric might have come after I read that, it's an example of how things pop in to my head, that's one line in a song as opposed to a whole song but that's how I like to use news stories, don't overkill, just use single lines."

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