Somewhere Else

'Some serious ship'
A play on the expression 'serious shit'. It is also a contraction of 'relationship'. As pointed out by Rich Harding, it may also refer to the incident when h's hand was slashed open by a bottle and he nearly bled to death whilst the resident band on a cruise ship. This is documented in the closing section of This Strange Engine.

'Laughing boys'
Rich Harding said, "Given the context and the photo opposite the lyrics, I'm tempted to suggest that ‘Laughing Boy’ is a direct reference to the song of the same name on Pulp’s This Is Hardcore."

However, ‘Laughing Boy’ is also a common expression for a glum person. The dictionary of slang at Peevish says, "Noun. A sardonic nickname for a male who looks miserable, e.g. "Cheer up laughing boy; it's not the end of the world!" Max Rael also noted that the expression re-appears in The Sky Above the Rain on Sounds That Can't Be Made.

'The beautiful game'
'The beautiful game' is an expression normally used as a euphemism for the game of football ('soccer' for those in the States).

'Mr Taurus ate a thesaurus'
h was born on the 14th of May, making him a Taurus according to those that follow astrology.

'Made the girls cry and skipped straight to the chorus'
A play on the nursery rhyme Georgie Porgy, which went as follows:

Georgie Porgie, Puddin' and Pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry,
When the boys came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away.

Georgie Porgie has been alleged to be about George Villers (1592-1628), a courtier of James I, and who was his lover. Villiers allegedly also had a torrid affair with Anne of Austria, Queen Consort of France.

'Mr Taurus had... ...no good at all'
A play on the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty, which went as follows:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Humpty Dumpty is popularly portrayed as an egg. The rhyme was originally a riddle, for which the answer was 'an egg', although the name is also said to mean a short clumsy person, and a brandy and ale mixture (Ugh - minging!), and a large mortar blown from the walls of a Colchester church during the Civil War, amongst other explanations.

'Here's one I broke earlier'
This line is a play on a well-known British catchphrase from the children's programme, Blue Peter. Blue Peter is a magazine programme that has run continuously from October 1958. The show regularly featured presenters cooking or making craft items. To save time, presenters would often say, '...and here's one I made earlier,' before producing a more complete version of whatever it was they were doing.

'Woke up in a spaceship of shimmering gold...'
Tim Myers pointed us to an interview by www.music-reviewer.com (site now apparently defunct), that said: "It came about because Steve and his wife after a long-term relationship parted company last year while we were writing the album. So he spent Christmas 2006 living round at Mark Kelly's, and Mark had gone away with his family. Christmas Eve, Steve was all alone and he was thinking of his kids and stuff and he started writing Somewhere Else. He happened to be in one of the bedrooms and it had all this kind of foily stuff and a very kind of spacey décor. The bit about being in a space ship is about being there in a place that you don’t necessarily recognize and all of it goes with your life being turned upside down."

Ric Messier said, "Surely that's a reference to the spaceship Heart of Gold?" The Heart of Gold is the spaceship from Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of radio shows/books/film, powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive. However, the Heart of Gold is white.

'Tutenkhamen sleeping'
Tutankhamen/ -amen/ -amon was a minor Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty (approx 1300 BC-ish), whose fame derives from the discovery of his almost intact tomb in the Valley of the Kings by Howard Carter in 1922. His ornate sarcophagus, one of the most popular images of ancient Egypt, was designed to make it look as though the dead king was still alive - which of course, the ancient Egyptians essentially believed; that he was in an afterlife.

'Floating round in Orion'
Orion, or the Hunter, is one of the best known constellations in our night sky. Of course, constellations are purely interpretation of perceived patterns from our limited viewing position, and there is no actual relationship between the stars of the constellation.

Rich Harding said "This probably needs an explanation of the theory proposed by Graham Hancock and others that the Egyptians and other ancient races may have gained knowledge of flight, possibly space flight, as evidenced by not only their prodigious building skills but their knowledge of precession of the equinoxes, which h appears to be referring to later in the verse." Liam Birch emailed and mentioned the same thing independently. He also pointed out that King Tut wasn't buried at Giza, but the Valley of the Kings, so it doesn't actually work that well!

Adapted from Wikipedia: "The basis of this theory concerns the proposition that the relative positions of three main Ancient Egyptian pyramids on the Giza plateau are (by design) correlated with the relative positions of the three stars in the constellation of Orion which make up Orion's Belt— as these stars appeared ca. 12,500 years ago." This pseudoscience theory is not well regarded by proper academics, since the calculations claimed by Hancock et al don't actually work...



There are no explanations for See It Like A Baby or Faith.

• The Other Half
• See It Like a Baby
• Thankyou Whoever You Are
• Most Toys
• Somewhere Else
• A Voice from the Past
• No Such Thing
• The Wound
• The Last Century for Man
• Faith
• Circular Ride (B Side)
  
  

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