Fools Gold

Brown and Squire wrote it, and Leckie produced. Sessions began on August 23, 1989, about six months after the album: eighteen days at Sawmills in Fowey, Cornwall, a converted 17th-century water mill, then four days at Battery Studio One for Brown's vocals and Squire's wah-wah licks. The first Battery mix was abandoned, and Leckie mixed it alone at RAK on October 3 and 4 with the B-side. Sound On Sound says Leckie first heard a demo with a four-bar drum loop, tambourine, guitar, vocal and reverb; the loop came from a record the band brought, was put in an Akai S1000 sampler and sequenced in Cubase, and about five minutes of it went to tape before guitar and bass. Brown said the song was written over James Brown's "Funky Drummer", and Squire told Q the loop on a breakbeats album from a Manchester record shop was where they heard it; one outlet claims otherwise, naming "Hot Pants", which we could not check. The bassline is adapted from Young MC's "Know How", and Squire said the riff drew on Johnny Cash's plucking of the bass strings.

The band wanted "What the World Is Waiting For" as the A-side, but Leckie thought "Fools Gold" was fantastic and should lead; who pushed the swap is contested between NME (a PR figure, Gareth Davies) and another source (Silvertone's A&R man). Brown said the verses were inspired by John Huston's 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in which three broke men pool money to hunt for gold and then betray each other; lines also nod to Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" and the Marquis de Sade. Lengths are 9:53 for the 12-inch and album version and 4:15 for the 7-inch, and our upload does not say which it is.

It reached 8 in the UK, 5 on US Alternative Airplay and 27 on US Dance Club, is platinum in the UK and re-entered the UK chart in 1995, 1999, 2005 and 2009. The video was shot in Lanzarote; Beck appears as a gold prospector in the US version. They played it on Top of the Pops in November 1989 alongside Happy Mondays, and at Spike Island it was ninth in the set. Reni's loop was sampled on Bananarama's 1990 "Only Your Love". NME ranked it 31st in its 500 greatest songs in 2014 and Triple J's 2009 Hottest 100 of All Time had it 76th.