Rodney explains what Wonderworld is about…

WonderWorld is a song about the English Midlands town of Corby. For most of the 20th century it was a classic British industrial town, built around a thriving steelworks, until Conservative Party government policies shut it down, leaving the town with no money and a huge unemployment problem. Then some corporate businessmen came along and promised to rebuild the town based around a gigantic theme park called WonderWorld. They received millions of pounds of funding, got given an enormous plot of land, and told everyone it was going to be the British version of Disneyland.

There were due to be 13 “worlds” including Story Village for children, Computer Park which allowed visitors to see the latest technology and Safety Place which was a bizarrely-themed world featuring safe play.

There was Energy World, which was described as an Omnimax Cinema and Air Space, which gave people the chance to experience the latest space technology.

There was also due to be 15,000 car parking spaces, 120 acres of housing and 2,000 hotel rooms. On the same site was supposed to be a 10,000-seat sports stadium and a 4,200-seat concert hall with a 30,000 capacity open-air theatre.

https://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/retro-end-of-the-world-for-corby-theme-park-1-5937497

Of course we realised that this was a gigantic con, but the local council didn’t, and they kept the project going until 1990, even though no work was ever done – 4 years after we released this song! The only thing they ever built was a big sign in front of a huge empty field, and a (fake) hut for the workmen who never came. They spent years telling everyone what an incredible new exciting thing this was going to be, but instead just stole what little money the working people had left and built nothing at all.

We thought this was a perfect metaphor for Britain under the Thatcher government, and so the song Wonderworld came about.

Ironically our song is now the only thing left of the entire project for people to remember.

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.