Songfacts®:

• This rousing ballad initially sounds like a slow-motion journey through outer space, but later reveals itself as a damning indictment of earthly capitalism and materialism.
• In the last verse, Paul Weller attacks the British establishment, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
  
  Nothing in the chambers
  Worth nothing at all
  All the wealth is hidden
  Diamonds a-glistening and solid gold
  Well, have it all
  It's worthless
  
  Paul Weller hasn't changed his political beliefs since he was involved in the formation of Red Wedge, a left-wing music coalition that supported the Labour Party in the 1987 election. "That's what that verse is about - all these greedy f---kers, like Boris and his cronies, the royal family," he told Uncut magazine in 2022. "But when you go out, you go out with nothing. We're not the pharaohs. You don't get buried with your gold, and even if you did... What good did it do to them? The most important things you hand down aren't material things."
• The Bristol-based Paraorchestra, an integrated orchestra of professional disabled and non-disabled musicians, played on "Rockets." Northern Irish composer Hannah Peel conducted the musicians and orchestrated the track.
  
  Hannah Peel told Mojo magazine. "I loved working on Rockets. I was thinking of Bowie with the arrangement, the way it all kicks off in the final verses, the melody on the strings all in unison, in octaves, to give that sense of finality and space."
  
• British singer-songwriter Jane Weaver contributed towards the remix, giving it a completely different, mind-bending, trippy feel. The collaboration originated with Weller saying he really liked her Modern Kosmology track "Slow Motion."
  
  "We texted a bit, then I saw him when he was playing in America," she told Uncut magazine. "During lockdown he asked if I wanted to do a remix: at the time I couldn't go in the studio and I couldn't go in my studio, so it was quite a hard task doing it from home."
• "Rockets" starts with someone heading off into space, transcending in some way. Then the second half is about what keeps us earthbound.
  
  "I suppose I was thinking of how some people just don't fit into boxes or systems, me included," Weller told Mojo. "I always felt that at school. Some people just aren't equipped for it and are always seen as being an outsider.
  
  I don't know what it's like now, but my generation would just factory fodder. I would see a lot of my mates, the ones who were lucky enough to leave school before me. They'd wave at me through the factory windows as I was going to school, taking the piss.
  
  I was lucky because music helped me see beyond that, that there's a possibility of another world out there that I'm not part of yet."