Videos

We Are The Physics – Napoleon Loves Josephine

• 9th Oct 2012

Two weeks ahead of the release of new album Your Friend, The Atom on 22nd October, We Are The Physics unleash a third song from the record. Napoleon Loves Josephine has long been a live favourite at the Glasgow quartet’s incendiary live performances – it’s just taken a while for them to settle on a recorded version, as vocalist Michael M attests below.

“This song’s been kicking about our live set for ages, but it took us about sixteen thousand (approx) recordings before we were happy with it. We wrote it about people using other people for personal gain, often mutually. It’s about manipulation and parasitic personalities and the inevitable consequences of being trapped in a cage of your own making. Wee Napoleon just got dragged into it because Josephine wasn’t actually Josephine’s name, he just renamed her. The lyrics fall vaguely over the bones of their story, but it’s not specifically about them, despite us shouting their names over and over again like Derek Acorah trying to summon ghosts who all have Liverpudlian accents. We make sure we play this song at every gig because our drummer, Michaeldrum, gets really tired playing it and one of the only pleasures we have in life is seeing him in pain.”

The track follows in the footsteps of two brand new singles released this summer – the internationally-successful Goran Ivanisevic and blistering shoutfest Applied Robotics. They feature, along with eleven other adrenaline-fuelled snippets of science-based post-punk on the album that’s already been described as “like Devo lost their minds” (The Skinny).

What’s more, 2013 will see We Are The Physics starring in God Help The Girl, the feature film written and directed by Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch. In the meantime, they’ll be making a lot of noise, very fast, somewhere near you.