Album: Sense (1992)
Charted: 31
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Songfacts®:

  • Just a taste of love will leave you wanting more, as Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds discovers in this song. He knows because when he's with the woman he loves, it all makes sense.

    In Lightning Seeds tradition, it sounds like a very sweet love song but has a layer of ambiguity. Love is addictive, and when it goes away, that's a problem. "It comes and goes, leaves me on a bed of splinters," he sings.

    "The bittersweet is what kind of defines it for me when I'm writing a tune," he explained in a Songfacts interview. "Generally, if it's got that to it, then I think it's a Lightning Seeds tune."
  • This was the first song Ian Broudie wrote with Terry Hall of The Specials. They collaborated again to write "Lucky You" for the next Lightning Seeds album, Jollification. "Terry and I have been great friends for a long time, and I tend to write better with people I know," Broudie told Songfacts. "I rarely work with people I don't know, certainly these days. When you're young, you kind of have to."
  • For all intents and purposes, The Lightning Seeds are an Ian Broudie solo project. His main collaborator in the '90s was Simon Rogers, who played various instruments on the Sense album and also produced it. Rogers and Broudie started working together on the 1988 album by The Fall, I Am Kurious Oranj.
  • The music video takes place inside a pyramid, like the ones found in ancient Egypt. Except this one has a (malfunctioning) elevator. It doesn't make much sense, but maybe that's the point.
  • The harmonica in this song comes from Mark Feltham, who shows up on scores of albums by big-name British artists, including Oasis, Talk Talk, and Rory Gallagher.
  • Terry Hall re-recorded "Sense" for his debut solo album, Home, in 1994.

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