Biographer David Buckley remarked on the song's "doomy sax-driven verses set incongruously aside cheesy choruses". The lyrics have been interpreted as a third-person revisitation of the themes of psychotic withdrawal explored on Bowie's previous album
Low ("Pacing their rooms just like a cell's dimensions"), as well as referencing the characters from his 1970 song "
The Supermen" ("They never die they just go to sleep one day") on the album
The Man Who Sold the World. Author
Nicholas Pegg speculated that the lines "platforms, blank looks, no books" and "rise for a year or two then make war" alluded to the Nazi regime. Bowie performed the song live during his 1987
Glass Spider Tour and it appears as a live track on the
Glass Spider live album and video. On this version of the song, the chorus is sung by the band's lead guitarist
Peter Frampton. The studio version appeared in the
Sound + Vision box set in 1989 (and re-released in 2003). A re-mastered version was released in the box set
A New Career in a New Town (1977–1982) (2017). ==Cover versions==