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Don’t Know

You said you were doing nothing
Call me up you’re doing nothing
You never know what is happening at all now

Pull the sofa over and watch the television
Glowing on into the night
All you said was you were doing nothing

You phone me up you’re doing nothing
You wanna go out and do something
You just don’t know what is happening, do you know?

Walk into town and wandered about
And stop then wondered what you’re doing
You’re doing nothing, nothing at all
You’re just doing nothing

Demo version

You said you were doing nothing
Called me up you were doing nothing
You never knew what was happening right here now

I pull the sofa over and watch the television
Glowing on into the night
All you said was you were doing nothing

You phoned me up you were doing nothing
You’re tempted to go out and do something
You just don’t know what is going on
Do you know?

I go out and wander about
And go and wonder what you’re doing
You were doing nothing, nothing much
You’re just doing nothing

Song Notes

“Don’t Know” featured on the bands early demo tapes before it appeared on the B-side of their debut 7” single “Jack Names the Planets”. It appeared as a hidden track on limited edition CD versions of 1977, playing before track 1 alongside the single version of “Jack Names the Planets”. It was also on the 2002 CD re-release of the “Jack Names the Planets” single.

Asked about why they chose the track as the flip side of their first single Rick reflected in a 2014 interview:

Looking back on it “Don’t Know” is probably a pretty odd choice for the flip side but I think it was a more current song for us and we were quite excited by it at the time. It’s kinda shoegazy in terms of the main hook, but filtered through our punk side. I love the verse riff; it maybe needed more work in hindsight to round it out, but that’s not how we worked back then.