Wiki
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Length
4:12
'I used "Swan Lake" for the melody. The reason it was called "Death Disco" was because it was about John's mom. The person he was singing about, 'seeing in your eyes,' was his mother dying. She was going through the glorious process of dying from cancer and it was all a bit heavy I suppose for everyone. That's what John was singing about very passionately, I might add. From my point of view, I was just trying to do something with the music. I didn't know what he was singing about at the time- he was just 'It's "Death Disco" Keith, that's what it is!'
Wobble just stands there and does his bass line and looks at me like 'I'm serious.' So the first thing I did was to figure out how to play around it. I hit a string and I've got this way of playing in a drone where it sounds like I'm playing in two guitars. E always worked the best for me on the guitar 'cause it's the lowest note and the highest. I could get the drone 'cause I could play between the two E's and get automatic sympathy to what I was playing.
So it happened that his bass line was in E. Jim was there I think. We had done it once before. I thought 'I'm not sure what I'm doing with this tune.' Just that harmonic thing down the strings. I would play the E chord and it would be like breaking glass in slow motion and then played E again really manically. I've got no problem with music being really simple. The whole thing was in E. That opened it up 'cause it was all literally in one note. I realized that this tune that I was bastardizing by mistake was "Swan Lake." So I started playing it on purpose but I was doing it from memory. You can hear that I'm not playing it exactly right. It just worked. So I was playing all around Wobble. For John, what I'd do was when he went to put the vocal in, I'd keep doing it. When he'd stop, I'd play "Swan Lake." When he'd sing again, I'd go back to the harmonic thing and build it up. It just worked so simply in a couple of rehearsals.'
Interview with Keith Levene, May 2001.
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