"I was working in an abattoir. There was a guy there called Paul who used to measure the value of his weekends against how many fights he'd been in. The Rats were about 2 months old and I began to write about Paul, calling him Billy. It was pretty much what I thought of Dublin at the time. "Hope bites the dust behind all the closed doors/and pus and grime ooze from its scab-crusted sores./ There's screaming and crying in the high-rise blocks./lt's a Rat Trap Billy, but you're already caught". What I was thinking of was a Van Morrison -type song which was epic, but narrative and takes place down the street like his early stuff did. People used to say it was a bit Springsteen-esque, but I actuallywrote it before I'd ever heard Bruce Springsteen. In fact, I remember hearing his name shortly afterwards and thinking, Who the fuck's going to buy a record by a guy with a name like that.

Anyway, we performed it on the Kenny Everett video show and people went mad for it. I remember one day it sold 90,000. One day it was an amazing vibe the day it went to No 1. I was in bed with Paula in this house we all shared in Chessington and we heard the news and went fucking mad. The first Irish band ever to get to No 1."

"The Great Song Of Indifference"

"That was me trying to find a new vibe. Two years from "Deep in The Heart Of Nowhere", I wanted to change and come up with a new sound completely. So Rupert Hine got together 5 guys in the studio who I had never met in my life and we wanted to do something as spontaneous as possible. I'd been in New Orleans listening to this Cajun band in a bar and it was just fantastic. So I tried to incorporate that spirit and gave myself 5 days to do the album, start to finish. "The Great Song Of indifference"

It actually started out as a sort of cod Paddy thing. It wasn't a "written" song. Everything that happened, including the words, was completely spontaneous. But I liked the words when I listened back to them. They were a nice reaction to what had gone before and it was a sideways shift away from the Rats sound."  

"Love Or Something"

"I was trying out my Cajun/lrish thing, but still using the R&B I was used to playing. The words are funny if you can hear them."

"Banana Republic"

"I wrote that just after the Rats had been refused permission to play in Ireland. They kept stopping us by removing the insurance from wherever we wanted to put the show on. it's hard now to understand, but to the Irish establishment, we were a bit like a Sex Pistols type band. But we had just been the first Irish band to be No 1 and we and most young Irish people were fairly proud of this. It turned into an us and them situation. I was very embittered. It was my thing about Ireland at that time. 't/ wonder do you wonder/When You're sleeping with your whore/Sharing beds with history/ls like licking running sores". Very bitter. "The purple and the pinstripe" in the Iyrics was the priests and politicians. And there's a reference to the Irish National Anthem; "Striking up 'A Soldier's Song/l know that tune/lt begs too many questions/And answers to/Banana Republic ". it caused a bit of a ruck, I'm glad to say. We eventually played in a private garden. Twenty thousand people came with 12 hours notice."
"Crazy"

"In the same spirit as "She's So Modern" and "Do They Know it's Xmas", this was a record with a purpose, ie, to have a hit single. (I'm writing this before the record comes out, so if "Crazy" is a stiff at the time of reading, then we obviously got it completely wrong). Nothing new there. So I sat down with Dave Stewart who is brilliant, and tried to come up with a dance-around-the-handbag" type vibe. Being me, it turned into a song about obsession. But it still sounds like a "proper" radio song, as opposed to a song I would like to hear on the radio, but only hear in my head - and subsequently on my records, which of course, never get played on the radio. And Sting's a bastard for having such a brilliant voice."

"The Elephants Graveyard"

"There had been race riots in Miami in 1979 and we had passed through. Three guys had been arrested within a day and found guilty of starting the riots. It was clearly laughable. "Guilty till proven guilty//isn't that the law?" It was the idea of all those people who had saved all their lives for "the golf-cart life" suddenly finding Paradise had a rotten core that appealed to me. "The Elephants' Graveyard ain't the place to be':"  

"Someone's Looking At You"

"I don't know what the fuck the words are about. Paranoia, I suppose. There seemed to be press and cameras everywhere at that time and I could still be bruised by them then. I started with that line "On a night like this I deserve to get kissed/At /east once or twice". Then it goes off into Bobworld. I think 2 things inspired some of the words: a Greenpeace rally in Trafalgar Square that I gave a speech at. "You saw me there in the square/When I was shooting my mouth off about saving some fish". And I'd jus t finished reading this book about murder which claimed that most murders are committed at 90 degrees.

"Well it's so hot outside and the air is so sweet/When the pressure drop is heavy/l can barely hear you speak/You know most killings are committed at 90 degrees/When it's too hot to breathe and it's too hot to think/There's always someone looking at you". Went to No 3, that one."

"She's So Modern"

"We'd had 2 records just outside the Top 10 and this was a conscious attempt to write a record that would get into the Top 10. There were some girls on the scene back then who always said just the "right" thing and wore the "right" clothes. Fashion babes. Some of them became famous. It's got references, not particularly veiled ones, to Magenta Divine and Julie Burchill who were around at that time. Modern Girls, you know if you listen to the words, some of it was pretty prophetic."  

"House On Fire"

"We were in Ibiza and it was hot and I was trying to get to sleep and the crickets were chirping. It's got that jungly vibe. "/ saw Tarzan outside playing on the jungle blues/l know cos I saw him shimmer in a Kenyan pool/Coming on in the vines with his leopardskin loincloth cool/Sony Watusi fingers beating on the bark of a tree". That's a good song.  

"The Beat of The Night"

"My father would tell me how in the 20's at parties, everyone was expected to do a party piece. His was to recite a Robert Service poem "The Shooting Of Dan McGrew" or "The Cremation Of Sam McGhee". I loved the rhythms of those doggerel poems. I love the story telling nature of them. One October night, the wind was whistling outside my window and the branches tapped the glass. "/t was cold that night when the crows flew West/And the days had lost their spark." I followed my mind and walked out into those imagined streets and wrote a sort of Hitchcock murder story of fear, panic, blood and horror."

"Diamond Smiles"

"This was based on a tiny article in the News Of The World. There was a debutante apparently called Diamond who had hanged herself from a chandelier at a Coming Out Ball. The only thing I remember about the piece was a friend of hers said, "She was a nice girl, she had a lovely smile." Pathetic."  

"Like Clockwork"

"The music was mainly written by Pete Briquette and Simon Crowe. We'd come out of being a fast R&B pop band and the most interesting thing we were listening to was Bowie who was doing incredible things at the time and Talking Heads. We had played with them and the Ramones in schools in the afternoons. I thought they were completely the bollocks in their jumpers and things. Psycho Killer, you know. Classic song. So these things seeped through unconsciously into what we were doing. I wanted the words to fit the metronomic feel of the song. Looking back, they pretty much reflected my neurotic, edgy situation at the time:

"I'm not disconnected/l'm not unaware/l'm in one place at one time/l'm hooked to the mainstream/Tuned into the world/Plugged into my surroundings/Not out on a limb/l'm thinking in a straight line/l'm thinking these thoughts are mine."

"Room19"

"I had read a small story that was like a paradigm for the break-up of the Soviet Union. Apparently in Moscow, there is the wonderfully named "Institute Of The Brain" V. Frankenstein. inside this place there is a Room 19 where the brains of Soviet 'Geniuses' are kept frozen. Lenin, Stalin, etc and real geniuses like Tchaikovsky, Pasternak, Sakharov etc. Soviet scientists would slice these brains into thin parma ham type pieces in order to study them and determine exactly how these people were different. Completely mad, of course, but it's the sort of thing that sticks with me. I imagined a guy dying and by mistake being put up on a shelf beside Stalin. He's shitting himselfbut Stalin insists he must be a genius or else he wouldn't be there. The Soviet Union makes no mistakes. Meanwhile, Lenin and Sakharov argue for eternity over the actual existence or not, of Room 19. My idea of Hell."

"Mary Of The 4th Form"

"Her name was actually Mary Preece. We used to hang out in a coffee bar and record shop in Dun Laoghaire called Murray's. After school, she'd come down and she'd have rolled up her skirt and she had legs for days. She was drop dead beautiful and I just wanted her so much and knew that I'd never be able to get her. Actually, I did "get off with her" - to use the parlance of the day - at the Killiney Tennis Club Dance. It was deeply passionate in a grabby, feely way. Anyway, Mary subsequently became the personal assistant to the Irish Prime Minister and lives beside my father, bizarrely enough. She's got two or three kids. But God, she was a major babe."

"Looking After No.1"

"Dr Feelgood were absolutely central to the Rats. When I heard "Down By The Jetty", it just fucking Blew. Me. Away. I still have it in the car. The Feelgoods and R&B were it for me. Our early live set used to be their entire first album and that was pretty well it. So "Looking After No 1" was my attempt to write a Feelgood's song at about 90 miles an hour. it's got a couple of good lines in it. 'The world owes me a living/l've been waiting on this dole queue too long/l've been standing in the rain for 15 minutes/And that's a quarter of an hour too long': It was all punk bravado, but it was a statement of intent. It was my way of saying, I'm going to be me. I'm not a wanker, you cunts. Twelve months after picking up my dole, going home and writing that song, it was in the Top 20. Weird life. The boy behind me in the queue was called Johnny Fingers. I started talking to him cos he was wearing pyjamas in the rain. He became the piano player. "