Waterfall

A song which you think initially, speaks of America's global dominance, the infiltration of British culture and a determination to break away, to run free from those haunting 'American satellites'.

Yet the Roses never were nationalists, and Squire's bold cover-art here, a Union Jack splattered with the American stars, is about the closest the group ever came to acknowledging any kind of national identity. 'It's not where you're from, it's where you're at', of course, and emphatically, 'The British Empire? Just a bunch of public schoolkids playing about!' The latter offers a strong idea of exactly what Ian Brown and John Squire thought of imperial nostalgia.

To me the song pens a beautiful tale of a ceaseless battler, the woman tirelessly threading a man's greatness and finally rising, stealing 'that which she never could own', and the immigrant 'racing from that hole' he calls home, lunging like the desperate eyes of a tiger towards its calling prey, a better life, survival. And isn't this all of us, leaping in sparks of burning fright towards that other place; wherever it is we think we belong, and, like waterfalls, eating ourselves in an unrelenting madness till we return into stone.