Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Making a New World" in English language version.
In our research, our very amateurish research, we were amazed to discover that the final repayment of debts related to war reparations was made in 2010. ... The song imagines someone in 2010 working in a back office at the German treasury having to go through this boring bureaucratic process of making sure this payment is made, but the payment relates to this massive and really important thing which has had all these horrific consequences for the 20th century. Just the idea that we haven't been able to escape this kind of bureaucratic decision, and just the idea that these consequences follow you around, consequences from war especially, consequences of diplomatic relations, they are going to follow you around.
The first two tracks are called "Sound Ranging" and "Silence". So for the first minute we tried to create a piece of music that in a way represented the idea of the guns still kind of going off. We tried to represent that by having different musical elements, almost in slightly different time signatures, to kind of give that feeling of things being irregular, being slightly chaotic as well. Then the next short track is just something to represent this idea of the silence after the guns stopped at 11 o'clock on the 11th of November 1918. We didn't want to do birdsong and all those things that you might associate with that. We just wanted something that felt calm but uncertain.
'Coffee or Wine' is the first proper song on the album and it's also the only song which deals directly with the end of the First World War. I suppose I was trying to write it from the point of view of a soldier after the armistice has been signed, and suddenly you're confronted with this reality which in a way is a huge relief, but also has this huge uncertainty about what are you going home back to. The world's changed, and yet you've been stuck in a trench for years. And the whole thing's been finished, not with a battle but by this signature on a piece of paper. There's a little detail in there about the Allied commander Ferdinand Foch ... how he was actually quite informal with his men, but there was one thing he was very insistent upon, and that was the regularity of his meals. So things could be very informal ... but he had to have his meals at 12 noon and 7 PM. And I just thought it was a very funny little detail about this person who was in charge of ending the war.
The song 'Do You Read Me?' is kind of about the development of radio transmissions in the first World War, obviously because we had this new airplane technology that also had to be a technology where you could send radio signals from the ground to an object moving in the sky. I suppose I imagined an ace pilot, the best guy in whatever the Royal Air Force was called then, and had been having these moments of freedom. Really dangerous, but free, up above the fighting. But in order to make it safe, in order to make it work, he has to be liked tied down by these radio transmission from the ground. He kind of has to join the club. So it's a bit of kind of wishful thinking, but that's where the idea for the song came from.
It's written from the point of view of Michael Dillon, who was one of the first people to go through female-to-male gender reassignment surgery. This surgery was performed by a plastic surgeon named Harold Gillies who had performed facial repair operations on British soldiers returning from the front, and he used this experience to do some of the very first gender reassignment surgeries. And Laura Dillon became Michael Dillon. The title of the song, 'A Change of Heir', I'm pretty sure I took from a newspaper headline which was about Michael Dillon, because he was now a man was heir to the Dillon baronetcy. And then to get away from the fuss, he decided to leave Britain and he went to India.
During the war, an American company called Kimberly-Clark had this material called cellu-cotton, which they thought would be good for dressings for wounds, and then it ended up being used by nurses on the front for sanitary protection. So I started looking into this and was amazed to discover that basically that the basically adverts for Kotex, which is what it became at the time, haven't really changed all that much. The whole conversation around mensuration hasn't really changed all that much. It's still something which is really hidden away. And especially for men, you just don't know about it, people don't talk about it, so this thing which is just a totally normal occurrence is something which we don't have proper language for. And I think it's kind of an indicator that we live still in a male-dominated society where this is just kind of swept under the rug and pretended that this 'terrible, shameful thing' doesn't really happen. I'm sure that if men had to go through it, then we probably would have language to deal with it.
It is about the setting up of the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. It's from the point of view of the people who were kind of putting it together, including people like the President of the United States Woodrow Wilson, who had this idea that if we put together a League of Nations, then that's all we'll need for countries to start cooperating and to prevent another World War. But Woodrow Wilson, although he was one of the main architects of the League of Nations, when he took it to his own Senate, they voted not to join and it was one of the reasons the League of Nations didn't work and ultimately led to the outbreak of the Second World War.