It was the first song we wrote with an audience in mind – we knew people were listening. I think we all knew it was a big song, almost a distillation of what we’d been doing to that point. The rhythm of the middle eight is very Smells Like Teen Spirit. He was listening to a lot of Nirvana at the time and you can hear that in the spiciness of the guitar line. Bernard – when he wants – can do really interesting jazzy chords but this is much more straightforward and direct. I first heard Animal Nitrate on a tape at the Premises in Hackney where we rehearsed. I love the idea that people would be humming along to a nice little tune, but underneath the lyrics are barbed and uncomfortable, as if we had smuggled a dangerous animal into their house.
I think they’d sussed us and didn’t want a Frankie Goes to Hollywood moment. After it went Top 10 there was a moment when the BBC Radio 1 bigwigs got in touch and asked us what the song was about. We were such a phenomenon by then they couldn’t ignore us, but it felt like we’d crashed the party. We showcased the song at the Brit awards. I’d grown up in a council house and was trying to talk about the failures and frustrations and the darkness of that background. I’d always liked the idea of writing a pop song with darker themes, so with Animal Nitrate I wanted to evoke this violent, sexual, underprivileged world. I wrote it down, forgot about it, opened my notebook the next day and there it was.
One night I was at a gig at the Powerhaus in Islington and overheard what I thought was “animal nitrate” in a drunken conversation.
I took it away but I just couldn’t write anything that I thought was any good. The working title was Dixon, because it sounded like the theme for Dixon of Dock Green. Bernard came up with the chords for Animal Nitrate and gave me a cassette of them with a drum machine on.
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