Wire to Wire

Album: Slipway Fires (2008)
Charted: 5
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Songfacts®:

  • In an interview. frontman and songwriter Johnny Borrell claimed he was so delighted with the lyric from this song, "she lives on Disillusion Row," that he plans to have it tattooed on his own skin.
  • Borrell told The Sun October 31, 2008 about this song's recording: "The recording was the fourth or fifth time we'd played it. It's all live with live vocal, live piano, live drums, all in one take. We recorded it on an old tape machine, in this tiny studio called the Fish Market in Willesden. We captured a moment."
  • The song's music video was inspired by a scene from the 1975 BBC adoption of Jerome K Jerome's comic novel Three Men In A Boat. The scene in question had the three main characters illuminating their way along the River Thames using matches and Johnny Borrell resolved to recreate it. He drafted in Stephen Frears, who'd directed the 1975 BBC film to helm the clip. At the age of 67, this was Frears' first pop promo. The director commented to Q magazine December 2008: "I daren't tell my kids. They (Razorlight) are rather groovy, aren't they."

    Stephen Frears does have a footnote in pop history. The Liverpool band comedy band Scaffold nearly had their career destroyed by inept directing by Frears, who apparently in his younger days had little idea about comic timing. They extracted revenge by writing about his "sticky-out ears" in "Lily The Pink," which topped the UK charts in 1968.

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