Rolling Stones singer releases new songs that paint a bleak and unsettling picture of Brexit Britain.
In “England Lost” he sings: “I went to see England but England lost / I went round the back but they said piss off,” in a line perhaps referring to the U.K.’s “back door” attempts to keep the benefits of EU membership despite having left.
Jagger also sings the lines: “I think I’m losing my imagination/ I’m tired of talking about immigration / You can’t get in and you can’t get out / I guess that’s what it’s really all about.”
The unsettling video that accompanies the song shows a sharp-suited man who grows increasingly agitated as he runs from an unknown terror towards the coast. He is eventually forcibly dragged back onto the beach as he attempts to flee into the waves. A girl asks him, “Where did you think you could go … pull yourself together.”
The songs contain “a sense of vulnerability of where we are as a country,” he said in a statement, according to Rolling Stone. He wrote the songs as a response to the “anxiety [and] unknowability of the changing political situation,” an apparent nervous breakdown.
In “Gotta Get a Grip,” Jagger is cutting about the U.K.’s political leadership and media establishment: “The world is upside down / Run by lunatics and clowns / No one speaks the truth and mad-house runs the town … Everybody’s stuffin’ their pockets / Everybody’s on the take / The news is all fake.”
And in an apparent reference to Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s comment during the 2016 referendum campaign that “people have had enough of experts” Jagger sings: “Refugees under your skin / Keep ’em under, keep ’em out / Intellectuals shut your mouth.”
