The guitarist and co-founder Robin Campbell have discusses how he wrote the band’s 1980 debut single Food For Thought. Food For Thought in my flat in Birmingham, just before Christmas one year… so it’s actually a Christmas song! Or rather, it’s inspired by the hypocrisy of Christmas, the fact that there are starving people in Africa and here we are all sat around eating our Christmas dinner and praising the Lord. And people are still dying every day, every minute while we’re doing it. But people tend to forget that because it came out as a single in April. It was our debut single: we had a record deal but the label weren’t in any hurry to release anything, and then we went on tour with The Pretenders who had the number one single and album at the time. So suddenly we had the chance to release a single, and our two favourite songs were Food For Thought and King, Food For Thought was obviously a big landmark for us.
The guitarist and co-founder Robin Campbell have discusses how he wrote the band’s 1980 debut single Food For Thought. Food For Thought in my flat in Birmingham, just before Christmas one year… so it’s actually a Christmas song! Or rather, it’s inspired by the hypocrisy of Christmas, the fact that there are starving people in Africa and here we are all sat around eating our Christmas dinner and praising the Lord. And people are still dying every day, every minute while we’re doing it. But people tend to forget that because it came out as a single in April. It was our debut single: we had a record deal but the label weren’t in any hurry to release anything, and then we went on tour with The Pretenders who had the number one single and album at the time. So suddenly we had the chance to release a single, and our two favourite songs were Food For Thought and King, Food For Thought was obviously a big landmark for us.