SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=papuvlVeZg8
This dancehall song tells the story of a single mother trying to give her son a better life. It was released on October 21, 2016 and was Clean Bandit’s first single as a trio following violinist Neil Milan’s departure earlier in the week.
The song features vocals by Jamaican dancehall singer Sean Paul, who more than anyone has brought the genre to the masses, and British singer-songwriter Anne-Marie whose hit tune “Alarm” was in the charts at the time of this song’s release.
The song was Clean Bandit’s second UK #1 single following “Rather Be,” which logged four weeks at the top. Their run at the summit stretched into the festive week, earning the group the highly coveted UK Christmas #1.
Clean Bandit’s Grace Chatto explained to Billboard magazine why the mother Anne-Marie and Sean Paul sing about is a pole dancer: “The song is about doing anything you can to give your child a decent life, and what you have to sacrifice and go through with to do that. In the song and in the music video we made, the mother works as an exotic dancer in order to fund the life with her child.”
She added: “In the video, we did a take on it where we juxtaposed the mundane reality of being in a job you might not like, which is a theme we explore in a lot of our videos, and juxtaposed that with a kind of fantasy world with the joy that dancing can bring you. The mother character in the video that’s spoken about in the song, you really don’t know if she’s fallen in love with pole dancing or if she’s just living in a dream world.”
Asked why the band chose such a specific subject matter, Chatto replied: “I’m not sure why we chose that, actually. I’ve always been interested in alternative family structures. Obviously, being a single mom is a very common structure. I’m actually kind of studying that kind of world the moment, because I think we grow up being taught to assume that there’s one kind of family idea, but there are so many different ways you can do it.”
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