Do It Clean

Coke again. Ian loved the stuff. You don't save your coke, you do it clean, the whole sack. Even if he had a barrel of it, he'd do the whole thing at once.

the protagonist of villiers terrace would seem to be expressing horror at a decadent scene...which (if true) would not necessary contradict any of the interpretations here.

Bernard would usually sing "now that we've grown up together/they're all doing drugs with me" when they played "true faith" live (why he wouldn't put it on the LP, who knows). but i don't know which people he would have been referring to.

Hmm, what is it that Mac is doing clean? Not drugs, bearing in mind this was an early song, around 1980... if you've ever seen the Bunnymen live though, you'll know that it's traditional for people to 'point' their shirts at the band during this song. Because "washing your clothes" is as good a meaning for this song as any!

Nice try Rich, but you are way off. "Not drugs," huh. As if there were no drugs in the early 80s. LOL. Echo, New Order, etc. were all considered part of the new psychedelic scene back then. Take a listen to The Cutter and tell me what he means by mixing up the medicine.

Oops, meant to quote, brewing alternatives/what's in the bottom drawer/waiting for things to come from The Cutter. Mixing up the medicine is from Villiers Terrace.

Either way, anyone who doesn't get these drug references is just fooling themselves.

"Heeeeeroin, be the death of me...."

"i've got a barrel of this..." ian's got a pretty big head.

I don't think this is specifically about coke, as about all the drugs. They did snort a lot of coke, but they also spent a lot of time on acid, and generally took whatever pills anyone had. Quoting Ian: "Pretty much everything but smack. No, I think I did smack once by accident because there was nothing else around." The title "do it clean" does sound specifically coke, but a lot of the other lines fit acid, amphetamines, etc. better—or just all of them.

Then-manager Bill "KLF" Drummond says this song was kept off the album and buried as a b-side of a non-album single, even though it was an obvious hit, because it was also too obviously a drug song, and the label wouldn't have allowed it. Ian said that was BS, and it was left off the album because the original version sucked, and it wasn't until they came back and recorded a totally different version that it was worth releasing. Who's remembering right? Who knows. But foreign labels apparently had no problems with the song—most of them added it as a bonus track—even if it didn't appear on LP in the UK until the best-of half a decade later.