Hamburg Song

"Hamburg Song was written in America - I seem to remember writing it on a guitar in the back of the bus. But the first time we ever got together and did a demo of it, was in Hamburg on a tour last year [it was 2004].We had a really great day - it was the first time we'd done any work on any new songs and we had a day off so we went into a studio and just worked on some new demos, and Hamburg Song was one of them. It was just labelled on the tape box as "Hamburg Song" and we never got round to changing it. Somehow the name seemed to fit really well with the song. Lyrically I guess it's about... again, it's a bit like Atlantic, it's about a fear of what we've got slipping away and I guess it's a plea just to remember what a great thing it is to have a bond between people. And even if you all go off and you do different things and you make different friends and have all these adventures as people do - it's just a plea that at the end of it all you're still the backstop in someone's life, as it were.

When we demoed it up, we did it very very simply, and then started to play it live a little bit and we played it very very simply, and Tom's just playing an organ on it. And there was definitely a temptation to turn it into this big ballad, and we just felt ... we actually tried it; we thought we better try it, so we tried putting some drums on it, and that song is all about atmosphere - in fact the whole record, the most important thing was to capture an atmosphere. And we just felt that the best way to do that with Hamburg Song was the way that we'd done it to start off with, which was really really stripped back and simple, so we kept it that way." - Tim - Podcast 3 (30th May 2006)