This is our "Music from A Bachelors Den"
The sound of loneliness turned up to ten
A horror soundtrack from a stagnant water-bed
And it sounds just like this
This is the sound of someone losing the plot
Making out that they're okay when they're not
You're gonna like it, but not a lot
And the chorus goes like this
Oh baby, here comes the fear again - oh oh
The end is near again - oh oh
A monkey's built a house on your back
You can't get anyone to come in the sack
And here comes another panic attack - oh
Here we go again
So now you know the words to our song
pretty soon you'll all be singing along
When you're sad, when you're lonely
and it all turns out wrong
When you've got the fear
And when you're no longer searching
for beauty or love
Just some kind of life
with the edges taken off
When you can't even define
what it is that you are frightened of
This song will be here
Oh baby, here comes the fear again - oh oh
The end is near again - oh oh
If you ever get that chimp off your back
If you ever find the thing that you lack
Oh, but you know you're only having a laugh - oh
Oh, here we go again
Until the end
Until the end
I wasn't happy at the time I wrote it, and I was thinking more than I ought to about whether it was worth doing another album at all, because I felt like Different Class had said it all. It frightened me to think that might be "it". There 's too much to take in, and sometimes it seems as though the mind shuts off and just feeds back on itself, and you get in a panic, convinced you're going to die. Putting yourself under this kind of pressure makes it worse. The liberating thing for me in The Fear was to really go over the top and lay it on very thick with all these bad things. I find it funny, because it's so over the top - your sex life is gone, there's not just a monkey on your back but it's built a house there. It's funny because it's so extreme. So instead of "avert your eyes" and saying "this isn't happening, I'm alright, I'm gonna be fine", to actually say: "OK, I feel shit". On a personal level it actually helped me by looking at the stuff and confronting it and saying "yeah, it's bad". Once you've used it and made it into a song, then it wasn't scary anymore for me.