Got the Time

Got the Time dates from 1977, before the band's final line-up. In A Cure for Gravity Jackson recalls that an earlier drummer struggled with it, because he wanted it fast, sharp and intense rather than loose and funky. The finished version closes Look Sharp! in under three minutes: a song about a life too crowded to breathe in, which Jackson once dedicated on BBC television to anyone who leads a hectic life. It was never a single, but it reached eleven on the American college radio chart.

On stage it has been played close to 350 times, usually as a sprint. Versions from the 1979 Peel session and Hatfield Polytechnic are on At the BBC, and a 1980 recording is on Live 1980/86. When Jackson revived it in 2010 he dropped the guitar and piano, saying he found it a tough one to play.

Anthrax

The song's second life came from Anthrax, who recorded it for Persistence of Time in 1990. Their single reached sixteen in Britain, and Anthrax have played it far more often than Jackson has: setlist.fm credits them with nearly thirteen hundred performances. Jackson's response, to Q in 1991, was that their version sounded a bit clumsy next to his band's, which played it about twice as fast, and he thanked them for the royalties. It has since been covered by the German punk band Donots, The Matches, and the Finnish folk-metal band Korpiklaani, who sang it in Finnish in 2021.