Since we have just released the newly remastered version of our first album Grenade, we thought it might be interesting for people to hear the background of how the record came about.

So let’s start with the first song: March.

Rodney: “This was the first song I ever wrote for The Cassandra Complex. I had just moved to Leeds, and had built a little studio in a spare room at my house at 4 Ashville Avenue in Leeds 6. One day while I was in there messing around with my EDP Wasp synthesiser and Spider sequencer I came up with the basic sequence that forms the backbone of the song. As it was playing I heard lots of men start shouting and chanting outside in the street. I looked out of the window and saw a huge crowd marching past with banners. It was a Right to Work march, where unemployed people were marching to London to protest about not having jobs.

As someone interested in technology and science fiction I found it very odd, and very short-sighted, to be protesting about needing to “work” and get paid by menial wages by some capitalist industry. Surely they should be protesting about not needing to work? And that became the inspiration for the lyrics of the song.

I wanted to write something really simplistic and direct that expressed the shortsightedness of this working class mentality that couldn’t see or reach for anything more than going to work at a grinding job every day and then coming home and watching TV every evening. And that considered that to be “freedom”.

In the end, the song became something like an extended meditation on the nature of freedom itself, and what it meant to be “free” – and freedom from what?

I started singing the lyrics and playing guitar along with them. I knew instantly that I had hit upon the formula for what I wanted The Cassandra Complex to be: an intense, robotic rhythm track, powerful lyrics, and distorted guitar over the top. And that was the start…”

Many months later we recorded the first, very minimal version of the song and released it as our first 12″ EP on Complex Records. It got great reviews and sold quite well, but it still wasn’t as powerful as we wanted it to be. So when it came time to record Grenade we decided to take the opportunity to re-record it and throw everything we had into it. And that’s how it became the first song on the first album.