[John Taylor goes track by track on the band's new release "All You Need is Now"; keep checking back to the blog section for the latest installment ]

Track three: 'Being Followed'.

Another song that went around the fields and houses before it became what you hear today. The first day of writing gave us a chord progression that suggested, at least I thought, a Russian feeling. The song sounded to me as if The Editors had co-written with Prokofiev. This got me to thinking the song should be about Svetlana Stalin, Joe's daughter (I had been reading 'In The Court of the Red Tsar'), so I tried selling Simon that idea, but he was less than enthusiastic. "You'll have to do that yourself," he said. I did try, but it didn't work and consequently was never used.

The style of the piece continued to evolve, as we all liked the chords and didn't want to lose the idea. Eventually Simon showed up with a lyric about surveillance and the lack of personal privacy in London today, a subject about which he can be quite passionate. He had called it 'Being Followed'.
This caused plenty of excitement, which inspired a late-rally in the sound styling department. Everything I now love about the music of this song, Nick's popcorning Moroder sequence, the 'Rio'-era rhythm section, and Dom's James Bond themed lick, all came at the eleventh hour, in June of this year, over twelve months after 'Svetlana' first came into being.