Songfacts®:

• This suicide ballad was partly inspired by the death of former Big Country vocalist Stuart Adamson, who never got over the collapse of his second marriage and was found hanged in a hotel room in Honolulu, Hawaii. Bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire told The Quietus: "I was looking at the pictures of Stuart Adamson, and it's not specifically just about Stuart, just the idea of, 'How could things go so wrong?' How could something so beautiful and talented eat itself up with anxiety and self-doubt, and can you ever fu--ing stop it? Which you probably can't."
  
  Wire added: "There's also the exhaustion of being in Manic Street Preachers, that line, 'I'm as tired as John Lennon sang'. I think 'I'm So Tired' by John Lennon is the perfect example of just being fu--ed, just that White Album haze. Lennon was incredibly intelligent, but he could distil that, and that's the fu--ing hardest thing on Earth to do. You're shutting down a little bit, you realise you have to be economical."
• The band wrote this for Morrissey but were too scared to ask him. Nicky Wire admitted to Digital Spy: "He's the one person I couldn't bear rejection from. I can take it from most people."