The Mexican by Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds

Album: Chasing Yesterday (2015)

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This stomping track was reworked from Noel Gallagher's 2011 aborted collaboration with Amorphous Androgynous. He told NME: "We were doing another song that will never see the light of day, and at the end I was playing bass and not liking what I was doing, so started messing about with an effects pedal and played a riff (sings it) and everybody leapt up and went, 'What's that?!' So they looped and put a drumbeat on it...and it's a little different."
The song finds Gallagher singing about "kids on crack." He explained to NME: "It's a line lifted from that "f---ing ridiculous thing David Cameron said about hugging hoodies and crackheads and giving them a bit of love. They need a f---ing baseball bat right across the f---ing skull."

Gallagher added: "That track comes after a run of quite intense and emotional and... not dark, dark is not the word, but navy-blue songs, and I needed something to lighten the mood."
This almost didn't make it onto Chasing Yesterday. Gallagher explained: "On the original running order 'The Mexican' wasn't on the album, but I felt it needed something better to lighten the mood a bit. That and 'In The Heat Of The Moment' were the two most throwaway things on the record, and that's what I want there."

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