Falling and Laughing

The band recorded it in late 1979 in a small studio, with Malcolm Ross sitting in. Collins put its wayward tuning down to the band not being able to afford a tuner. Horne, Collins and McClymont paid for the pressing, and it appeared in February 1980 as Postcard 80-1, with Moscow, a would-be theme for that year's Olympics, on the B-side. Fewer than 1,000 copies were made, most with a Felicity flexi-disc, and it was never reissued as a single. In August 1981 the band re-recorded it with Adam Kidron to open You Can't Hide Your Love Forever.

It sets a disco bassline lifted from an ELO song, which Malcolm Jack of the Guardian identifies as Last Train to London, against guitars in the manner of the Velvet Underground. Wikipedia hears it celebrating the innocence of youth, while Jack reads the lyric as turning shyness into a grand, principled refusal. After Collins's stroke, Uncut found its lines about loneliness and pain almost unbearably poignant. Grace Maxwell gave her memoir of his recovery the same title, and Keir Starmer chose it on Desert Island Discs in 2020.

Live

It is the song Orange Juice played most, with 28 logged performances, and Collins has played it 63 more times as a solo artist. He opened his farewell Glasgow show with it in September 2025. Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens thought it sounded much better live, like a classic. The upload in the hypersongs web is a live television performance from BBC2's Something Else, broadcast on 6 November 1981.