Songfacts®:

• Tensions are rising high in this eight-minute track as hordes of people are jammed together on a subway platform waiting for a delayed train to arrive. Tired and sweaty, their individual problems are amplified as aggression builds and threatens that "something's gotta blow."
  
  Joan Armatrading wrote from her own experience. "They announced there'd been a suicide so all the lines were being stopped. The platform was seriously packed and hot. People weren't annoyed by the suicide but by the wait and the heat, and before we got to the station the escalator had broken down, so all this was going on. When the train finally came I whipped out my pen and paper and wrote the words, so all of the things that you hear are what happened that day," she told Daniel Rachel for the book The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters.