This song is about creating music. But I don't think "the cutter" is the labels and their pet producers trying to water it down, as so many of the comments say. From almost any other band, I'd agree, but not from Ian McCulloch.
For one thing, Echo & the Bunnymen had been lucky and never really faced any kind of label interference up to this point. And if you look at the history of this album, even in Ian's words, he was the reason for all of the problems they had with it, not the label (much less the producer, Ian Broudie, who the band asked for and got over the label's original choice). It's worth reading the story in Turquoise Days, or at least the summary on the Wikipedia page for this album.
Ian has said the whole album is about "coming to terms with the opposites in me", and that it's "so personal that I hate it, it's oppressive". It ties in with the general struggle with OCD that so many of his songs are about, but in this one, it's specifically about how that struggle manifests when trying to get a song from the raw Peel Session version to the final world-conquering single. It's his own alternating self-doubt and perfectionism that drove him to keep rewriting and rearranging this song (only part of the chorus survived from the 1981 version, called "Happy Loss"), and I think that as it evolved over countless obsessive rewrites, it became about that process itself.
This song is about creating music. But I don't think "the cutter" is the labels and their pet producers trying to water it down, as so many of the comments say. From almost any other band, I'd agree, but not from Ian McCulloch.
For one thing, Echo & the Bunnymen had been lucky and never really faced any kind of label interference up to this point. And if you look at the history of this album, even in Ian's words, he was the reason for all of the problems they had with it, not the label (much less the producer, Ian Broudie, who the band asked for and got over the label's original choice). It's worth reading the story in Turquoise Days, or at least the summary on the Wikipedia page for this album.
Ian has said the whole album is about "coming to terms with the opposites in me", and that it's "so personal that I hate it, it's oppressive". It ties in with the general struggle with OCD that so many of his songs are about, but in this one, it's specifically about how that struggle manifests when trying to get a song from the raw Peel Session version to the final world-conquering single. It's his own alternating self-doubt and perfectionism that drove him to keep rewriting and rearranging this song (only part of the chorus survived from the 1981 version, called "Happy Loss"), and I think that as it evolved over countless obsessive rewrites, it became about that process itself.