Sour Times

Sour Times is the second track on Dummy, written by all three members and released by Go! Beat on 1 August 1994 as the second single, with It's a Fire, Pedestal and Theme from To Kill a Dead Man as bonus tracks. Beth Gibbons sang, Geoff Barrow programmed, Adrian Utley played guitar and Neil Solman played Rhodes piano and Hammond organ. It rests on a sample of Lalo Schifrin's Danube Incident from the 1967 album More Mission: Impossible, which was sped up, taking Schifrin's arrangement up nearly a semitone. Smokey Brooks's Spin It Jig is also credited as a sample.

It first reached only number 57 in the UK. After the success of Glory Box in 1995 it was re-released and peaked at number 13 in April. It is the band's only song to reach the US Billboard Hot 100, at number 53, and it gave them their first entry on the Australian chart, at number 66 in March 1995. Melody Maker's Simon Reynolds made it Single of the Week and called it absolutely brilliant and absolutely modern. In Pitchfork, Philip Sherburne wrote that its beat resembles the Funky Drummer break transposed for a planet with half of Earth's gravity. Alexander Hemming directed the video, which was released on 25 July 1994 and taken from the 10-minute short film To Kill a Dead Man.

Live and covers

It was played at 155 of the 241 shows logged on setlist.fm. The European CD single of Numb carried a live version of it running 5:52, and the version on Roseland NYC Live was recorded at the Warfield in San Francisco on 1 April 1998. The 2023 expanded edition swaps in the performance from the Roseland Ballroom. The Blank Theory covered it on Beyond the Calm of the Corridor, a version used in the trailer for Wicker Park, Velvet Chain covered it on their 1997 album Warm and Marsha Ambrosius covered it in 2011. It was the theme music for the ITV drama The Vice.