Somewhere Only We Know

Rice-Oxley composed the first demo around 2001. It was first played on guitar just before Dominic Scott left the band, and was demoed that year on a Yamaha CP-70 piano instead. The final version was recorded in 2003 at Helioscentric Studios. Rice-Oxley said he was thinking of something like Bowie's Heroes, a song to drive along to over a rocking beat, and named The Smiths, Oasis, U2, The Beatles, Radiohead and Paul Simon among its influences. He recorded the bass himself, and until Jesse Quin arrived in 2007 the band played a pre-recorded bass part live. The studio version is at 86 beats per minute in A major.

The lyric refers to Manser's Shaw, a patch of scrub in Battle, East Sussex, that the band visited as children. Rice-Oxley told The Guardian's Dave Simpson that the fallen tree in the song was a real pine tree there, and the band wrote the song after returning to Battle from London without success. Hughes has said it can mean something different to each listener, a theme more than a specific message.

Chart and afterlife

It peaked at three in the UK in its first week of sales and has been certified triple platinum in the UK and double platinum in the US. Corin Hardy directed the video. The B-sides were Snowed Under and Walnut Tree. Keane played the song at Live 8 in Hyde Park in 2005 and at Glastonbury in 2024. Lily Allen recorded it for John Lewis's 2013 Christmas advertisement, released on 10 November 2013, and her version reached number one in the UK on 24 November and sold more than 600,000 copies.