Songfacts®:

• This song finds Keane recalling their early days together when the then teenage trio were in the habit of strolling down the Bexhill seafront on England's south coast and drinking tea at the Sovereign Light Café. "It's about a place we used to go to in (nearby) Bexhill," pianist Tim Rice-Oxley told Q magazine. "There's a lot of hope on this album. Sovereign Light Café is about getting back to the start, a time when we were talking about all the great stuff we were going to do with our lives."
• This was the first song that Rice-Oxley wrote for the album, and for a long time it was the only definite contender he felt he had for the band's fourth long player.
• Rice-Oxley told the story of the song on the Keane website: "I had a sketch of the melody on a cassette and was listening to it on a flight into Mexico in 2009. I couldn't come up with any words, but then I was sitting in a bus on the way from Sao Paulo airport to our hotel and suddenly the name of the old cafe on Bexhill seafront came into my head. I had actually always wanted to write a song with that title - when I was about 16 I remember being on holiday with Richard (Hughes, drums) and having a song that went 'Sovereign Light Cafe, down by the sea, go there with me' or something… it was a crap song! Anyway after a gap of many years the phrase popped back into my head and unlocked this idea of looking back to the beginning and trying to work out what had happened to me, and to us, over the last 15 years or so."
• When Rice-Oxley did a demo of the song on the tour bus, he recalled that, "because I wanted to sing the vocal without disturbing anyone I sat in the back of the bus with a duvet over my head to muffle the sound."