From Rush Hour With Love

Album: Speed Ballads (1998)
Charted: 20
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Songfacts®:

  • "From Rush Hour With Love" is a parody of sorts of the 1963 James Bond movie From Russia With Love, with any spycraft bogged down by traffic. The song was the first single from Republica's second album, Speed Ballads.

    The group broke through in 1996 with their hit "Ready To Go," followed by "Drop Dead Gorgeous," a Top 10 hit in their native UK that was featured in the movie Scream. But when it came time to release Speed Ballads, their label, Deconstruction Records, was under water and gave it little promotion. Neither the album nor the "From Rush Hour With Love" were even released in America, where Republica spent much of 1996 touring. The song went to #20 in the UK but was the last hit for the group, which split up a few years later. They regrouped in 2008 and finally released new music in 2013 with the EP Christiana Obey.
  • The lyric is rather abstract, with a guy calling from rush hour every morning to express his love. Lines like this are head-scratchers:

    I came back as an insect
    But in another space and time


    Republica's lead singer Saffron wrote the lyric with their guitarist, Johnny Glue, who is dyslexic. "Some of our lyrics seem back to front, the wrong way around," she explained to Songfacts. "And sometimes there's a bit of irony there that people don't always get."

    "'From Rush Hour With Love' is a take from the James Bond theme," she added. "And traffic is such a huge thing in London. I'm sure you understand that rage: Why is this happening to me? That sense of overwhelming. You've allowed something that only later do you realize you've enabled. So it didn't work out, but hey, I'm in rush hour with love. You've got to pull yourself back together.

    It's a positive-behavior view on things. People are so quick to be offended by things these days, and that incites fear to talk or to communicate, which I don't agree with at all, worrying about what somebody else may think or feel about you."
  • The opening lines:

    No Android dreamt of Victoria
    Or tube station allergens


    Relate to Queen Victoria and also to the Victoria Station tube stop in London. For Saffron, it holds another meaning as well: She was in a production of the roller-skating musical Starlight Express that played at the Apollo Victoria Theatre in the West End.

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