Club Country

Club Country, written by Billy MacKenzie and Alan Rankine, is the ninth of ten tracks on Sulk at 5:29. The single came out on April 30, 1982, by Wikipedia's date, or April 29 by MusicBrainz's, and reached number 13 on the UK singles chart in May. It was written in 1980, per Classic Pop, and a demo made at Morgan Studios helped win the Beggars Banquet deal; demos of this song and Party Fears Two secured the WEA contract at the end of 1981. The album recording was made at Playground Studios with Mike Hedges. Martha Ladly plays keyboards on it, and Rankine said a Synclavier supplied the strings on the intro.

Rankine believed it was a response to the superficiality of the New Romantic club scene, and the Electricity Club writes that it came from a night at the Blitz Club, a musical take on the scene's emptiness with vicious synthesizer lines, manic rhythm guitar and crashing treated drums. The Quietus calls it straight-ahead synth-pop bliss that skewers middle-class inertia, and Chi Ming Lai of the Electricity Club calls it Synth Britannia's answer to Le Freak.

The recordings and the live record

The two uploads on hypersongs are a 2000 remaster, titled Club Country (2000 Remaster), which uses the edit of the song at 4:48 from the V2 reissue of Sulk, and the 1982 promotional video, titled as a remastered promo with lyrics. Michael Dempsey told Electronic Sound that the multitracks for Club Country and Party Fears Two were lost long ago; the Electricity Club interview says the Club Country multitracks were later found, with Dempsey unsure where they came from.

Setlist.fm lists the song in nine setlists, among the band's most played, including St James's Church in London on July 19, 1985 and George Square in Glasgow on June 3, 1990. ONETWO covered it.