‘Its release seemed timely as the Tories had just left office. But then Diana died and all cheerful songs were taken straight off the radio. Boom! It disappeared’
John Lennon once said that everything he wrote was two songs in one. I’ve always stood by that. So you can take What a Beautiful Day at face value, like: “Oh, he’s having a lovely day.” But the song is essentially about revolution and bringing down the government.
When I wrote it in late 1996, it was a time of change politically. It was pretty much the end of the Tories. Tony Blair hadn’t quite got in, but you knew he was going to. I wasn’t a Blair supporter, but he was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. There was a tangible optimism. Apartheid had ended. The cold war was no longer an issue, so you didn’t feel like you were about to be nuked.
What a Beautiful Day has some subversive lyrics. The song was written around Bonfire Night, so the first verse’s opening line came straight to me: “It was on the fifth of November …” I live in Lewes, where we have one of the country’s last fire festivals, and every year we burn political effigies. It’s very controversial and the police hate it. The references to Audrey Hepburn and Errol Flynn came from my love of old movies, and I’d just been on holiday to Cuba – that’s how Che Guevara got in there.
