The Survivors Writers - Tennant/Lowe First released - 1996 Original album - Bilingual Subsequent albums - (none) Other releases - (none) With this track Neil and Chris responded to recurring rumors that one or both of them have AIDS. In essence, they simply express how they feel as survivors of the epidemic, being able to continue and flourish while so many others, including friends, sicken and die. Theyre grateful for their good fortune, yet saddened by the loss of so many others. They feel the best thing they—or anyone—can do to commemorate those who have passed on is indeed to survive, carrying on in their stead. Somehow well survive. Neil has noted, in a 2009 interview with Andrew Sullivan, that AIDS was only one of the inspirations for this song. The other chief inspiration was the suicide of a young woman he used to work with at Smash Hits magazine. The lines about Saturday girls and suits and sequins are specifically to her (She was in sequins, as Neil put it). So, from that perspective, The Survivors isnt just about surviving AIDS: its about surviving all the terrible things that life can hurl in your path, some of which can lead to premature death. By the way, Neil has stated elsewhere that, of all their non-singles, this is the one he most regrets not releasing as a single. Annotations •Cross a windy bridge one winter night / Past Embankment Gardens, enter warmth and light – Embankment Gardens may refer either the gardens along Victoria Embankment in the Greater London city of Westminster, between Westminster and Waterloo Bridges (in which case the windy bridge probably refers to one of those bridges or another, Hungerford Bridge, that lies between them) or to a series of connected parks and gardens in the Chelsea and Kensington districts of Greater London, located along the Thames near the Chelsea Bridge and the Battersea Footbridge that crosses beneath it (also candidates for the windy bridge). These gardens are prized by residents of London as peaceful respites in the midst of their city. One of my longtime site visitors, David B—who embraces the first (and, frankly, more likely) interpretation of Embankment Gardens noted above—quite reasonably interprets the first stanza of the song in terms of a very specific walk thats apparently familiar to a great many Londoners. He describes this walk as: …across Hungerford Bridge, then down the steps, through Embankment tube station, past Embankment Gardens (on the right), and then up Villiers Street to the Strand, Trafalgar Square, Theatreland, warmth and light, etc. Being a South West Londoner who often crosses the river from Waterloo station, its a journey Ive made countless times and is something of a quintessential London experience: Hungerford Bridge is very bleak and windy in the winter and theres a wonderful sense of being suddenly embraced in the warmth of the West End. This part of the West End also happens to be home to the famed Heaven nightclub, which may be even more specifically what the Boys are referring to with regard to enter[ing] warmth and light. •Saturday girls – British slang for young urban women in their late teens or early twenties who work in shops, usually as sales clerks. (The term Saturday girls possibly arose from the fact that such shops often employed young women as additional help for Saturdays when they had more customers than on weekdays.) Neil has described it as a reference to three girls who worked with him at Smash Hits in the early eighties, one of whom (as noted above) later committed suicide. Less commonly, however, the term Saturday girls has been used to refer to certain young gay men who, after spending their work week in more conventional mens attire, dress in drag on Saturday nights, thereby transforming themselves into Saturday girls. Given the AIDS-related theme that underlies one level of meaning in this song, its possible—though, as already noted, by no means essential—that Neil may have had this alternate usage in mind as well. •Twinsets and pearls – Twinsets (sometimes spelled as two words, twin set) have been a staple of womens fashion since the mid-twentieth century. They consist of a sweater (usually a button-up cardigan style, though most often worn unbuttoned) with a matching short-sleeved top. And they are indeed very often worn with pearls.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Dec 2013 14:09:40 +0000
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