Songfacts®:

• This is the opening track from English singer-songwriter Paul Weller's eleventh solo album, Sonik Kicks. It was recorded in Weller's own Black Barn Studios in Ripley, Surrey, with co-producer Simon Dine and engineer Charles Rees. Weller commented to Uncut magazine regarding the album's influences: "I've been listening to a lot of free form music, call it electronica or whatever. And I like Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, so I guess there's a certain amount of influence, but more in textural and sonic terms. There are some avantgarde and electronic elements that have been incorporated into the songs and there are a couple of soundscape pieces. There's an experimental edge to it, but with some good tunes."
• Lyrically, this song is made up of a stream of free form half-spoken words. Weller explained to Q magazine: "There's a track called 'Green' that's a sort of mad, stream-of-consciousness thing taken from lists of everything Dine and I saw on our journeys to the studio one day."
• The first version of Sonik Kicks was completed in March 2011 only to be rejected by Weller as "too full-on." So Weller removed four tracks, replacing them with the pastoral "Sleep Of the Scene" and "By The Waters" and recruited Stan Kybert to come in and strip the sound back a bit. He explained to Uncut magazine: "The first version wasn't doing what the title said, it wasn't sonic enough and it wasn't kicking. Stan really turned it round in the mix. He was just ruthless with it and cut back a lot of stuff, making it cleaner and harder. All that extreme stereo sonic trickery on 'Green' was down to Stan. And that crystallizes Sonik Kicks to me. I wouldn't have been clever enough to think of it or do it."