Format CD single Length 3:53 Writer(s) Justin Currie | Genre Folk rock Label A&M | |
Released December 1989 (UK)
January 1990 (US) | ||
"Nothing Ever Happens" is a song by the Scottish rock band Del Amitri. Released as a single between late 1989 and early 1990, it reached #11 in the UK charts (it was the band's biggest hit in the UK), and was a top-10 hit in Ireland, peaking at #4. It is the last track on the album Waking Hours. The song was ranked at number 82 on a list of the 100 greatest songs of the 1990s by listeners of Absolute Radio.
Contents
Track listing
A-side
B-side
Lyrics and composition
The song quite literally describes the monotone and repetitive nature of people's daily lives, where "nothing ever happens". In this world each day equals the next for which the "cameras in department stores shoot the same movie every day", while the employees are "the stars of these films [who] neither die nor get killed" - they only live on just like in a "constant action replay". All the while it is stressed, that this daily routine does not make anyone happy, as "we'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow". Each repeated day ends the same when "everything's dead and every third car is a cab and ignorant people sleep in their beds like the doped white mice in the college lab". Being compared to those doped lab mice shows the controlled behavior the song implies for the modern man, who does not seem to understand anything about this unchanging world he lives in, as "the needle returns to the start of the song and we all sing along like before". The consumer-oriented economy is criticized as "bill hoardings advertise products that nobody needs" and our money being only "values of copper and tin". Even the Kristallnacht of Nazi Germany is mentioned as "they'll burn down the synagogues at six o'clock" - but having nothing learned "we'll all go along like before". With this the endless cycle of ignorance, consumerism and war is completely described and ready to begin a new - as "we'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow". Thus proving the fact that "Nothing Ever Happens" and the world remains the same.