Begging You

I'm begging you
I'm begging you...

The fly on the coach wheel told me that he got it
And he knew what to do with it
Everybody saw it, saw the dust that he made

King bee in a frenzy, ready to blow
Got the horn good to go, wait oh your sting's all gone
Now he's begging you, begging you

I'm begging you
I'm begging you...

Here is a warning, the sky will divide
Since I took off the lid now there's nowhere to hide
Now I'm begging you, begging you
This is a mystery not to be solved
But be minded like-minded, I'm gone, still I'm with you
I'm begging you, I'm begging you

Give it over, give it over
Give it over, give it over
Yeah I'm begging you
I'm begging you
Give it over, give it over
Give it over, give it over
Yeah I'm begging you
I'm begging you

Weigh it and say it
Is it all in a name
Does it call you or maul you
And drive you insane
Can it make you remember time is a place
Now I'm begging you
I'm begging you

The fly on the coach wheel told me that he got it
And he knew what to do with it
Everybody saw it, saw the dust that he made

Make all the dust that you can
Make all the dust that you can
King bee in a frenzy, ready to blow

Lyrics by:
Squire / Brown

Music by:
Squire / Brown

Written:
1993

Personnel:
John Squire (guitar, recording of jets)
Ian Brown (vocals)
Gary Mounfield (bass)
Alan Wren (drums, backing vocals)

Producer:
Simon Dawson & Paul Schroeder. Partly recorded by John Leckie.

Engineer:

Programmer:
Brian Pugsley

Format:
Released 1995:
Begging You (radio edit) / Begging You (chic edit) (Geffen, WGFSTD 22060, CD promo)
Begging You (Geffen, WGFST 22060, 12" promo)
Begging You (Geffen, WGFSX 22060, 12" promo)

Released October 1995:
Begging You (lp version) / Begging You (lakota mix) / Begging You (stone corporation mix) / Begging You (chic mix) / Begging You (young amercian primitive remix) / Begging You (radio edit version) (Geffen, GEFDM-22061, Australian CD)

Released November 1995:
Begging You (album version) / Begging You (lakota mix) / Begging You (stone corporation vox) / Begging You (chic mix) / Begging You (young amercian primitive remix) (Geffen, GFSTD 22060, CD)
Begging You (album version) / Begging You (chic mix) (Geffen, GFST 22060, 12")
Begging You (album version) / Begging You (chic mix) (Geffen, GFSC 22060, cassette)

UK chart details:
Begging You entered the charts on 11th November 1995, spending 3 weeks in the charts and reaching a highest position of 15.

Also available on:
Second Coming (4.56)
The Very Best Of The Stone Roses (4.55)

First live performance:
Stockholm Palladium (20th April 1995)

Artwork details:
The Begging You artwork is from 'Begging You' (1995), plaster, floppy discs and watercolour on plywood, 35" x 35"

Details:

I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as late figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The sky receded like a scroll, rolling up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.

Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and every free man hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb ! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand ?"
(Revelation 6: 12 - 17)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming ! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert;
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born ?

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming (1919)

Top: 'The Great Day of His Wrath' (1851 - 53) by John Martin.
Second row: 'Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' (1887) by Victor Vasnetsov.
Third row: Albrecht Dürer's woodcut depiction, 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' (1498).
Bottom: 'The Last Judgment' (1536 - 1541) by Michelangelo, depicting the Second Coming of Christ.

The Stone Roses had planned to embark on a secret comeback tour of the UK in April 1995, but this was cancelled after the music press announced the dates. The scene was set at Glastonbury Festival on 24th June 1995 for The Stone Roses to make their long-anticipated UK comeback; however, John Squire's mountain biking accident in Northern California, just three weeks prior to this, quashed any hopes of a festival coronation. The band finally booked a full UK tour for November and December 1995, and all dates sold out in a day. Begging You, the last of the Roses' thirteen singles, entered the charts in mid-November, just prior to the commencement of the tour. Whilst this experimental techno-guitar crossover cut holds some appeal, I would disagree with Ian Brown's assessment that it was one of the best things that the band ever did.

"This was really the main one for sample loops. The loops were done before the group came to Rockfield, by a guy called Brian Pugsley, who structured the loops they had created. John had them on disk, and I think Brian just got them in the right place and at the right time - quite a lot of work, I think. Brian also programmed a bass pulse, a sample of an oscillator generating a sine wave at a low frequency, which we ended up using in the verses of the song. Mani had come up with a bassline, but we liked the pulse. It was quite difficult though - because the pulse was a straight sine wave from an oscillator, it had no harmonics, so we had quite a problem at the mix getting it so you could hear it. We were cutting from the bass to the pulse, and matching it up was quite tricky. You can hear it when you've got a really nice pair of speakers.

"Other than that, there are a few different loops in there - old soul loops running backwards, slowed down - so no-one can recognise them - and there's also a backwards guitar riff, which John had to learn to play in reverse. We turned the tape over so it ran the opposite way, then John experimented over the backwards music until we found something that worked when we turned the tape back over. It became the main riff, and we decided to triple-track it, so John had to do it the same three times, which is quite hard to do over backwards music ! There are also some jets in the middle of the song, which John Squire recorded at an air show with his DAT player holding his mic up in the air, and which we layered in."
(Simon Dawson speaking to Sound On Sound magazine, May 1995)

 

Top left: Discothèque (1997), U2's third UK Number 1, takes inspiration from Begging You.
Top right: Fear of a Black Planet (1990) by Public Enemy. Speaking to Select Magazine in November 1997, John Squire cited Public Enemy as a considerable influence on this track: "I got hooked on Public Enemy's Fear Of A Black Planet and I wanted to make music like that - deconstruct it and reassemble it. So a guy called Si Crompton was showing me how to use the sequencers and samplers. But it wasn't for me. Too much like a science lesson. So I ripped up the floppy disks I had used and set them in plaster. I pinched all the colours from a Degas painting." Ian Brown went to see Public Enemy at Manchester Apollo (Eric B and Rakim and LL Cool J also performed) in 1988.
Bottom: 'Begging You' (1995) plaster, floppy discs and watercolour on plywood, 35" x 35", from the Manchester exhibition, May 2004.

In the opening sequence of Terminator 2, James Cameron used a burning children's playground to depict his apocalyptic vision; on Begging You, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are transposed into the world of an Aesop fable.

The Fly and the Draught-Mule by Aesop:

A Fly sat on the axle-tree of a chariot, and addressing the Draught-Mule said, "How slow you are ! Why do you not go faster ? See if I do not prick your neck with my sting." The Draught-Mule replied, "I do not heed your threats; I only care for him who sits above you, and who quickens my pace with his whip, or holds me back with the reins. Away, therefore, with your insolence, for I know well when to go fast, and when to go slow."

King bee in a frenzy, ready to blow
Got the horn good to go, wait oh your sting's all gone

A Fly Upon a Wheel by Abstemius:

"What a dust do I raise !" says the Fly, "upon the Coach-wheel ? And what a rate do I drive at." says the same Fly again, "upon the horse's buttock !"

The fly on the coach wheel told me that he got it...
Everybody saw it, saw the dust that he made

 

Left: Journalist Stuart Bailie - sporting an Ian Brown mask - meets Robbie Williams in the Glastonbury backstage area in 1995. The Stone Roses had to withdraw from Glastonbury that year due to Squire's mountain biking accident and the NME jokingly supplied Stone Roses maksks for festival goers to wear, in the absence of the band. The Begging You video (right) seems to have taken its cue from this, with female nightclub performers wearing face masks of each individual band member. A continental pastiche of Led Zeppelin's 'Trampled Underfoot', the Begging You video is an uninspired hodgepodge of imagery, mixing video footage from the Roses' Berlin Metropol gig (25th April 1995) with traditional dances from various cultures. Ian Brown recognizes the lack of visual creativity in the band at this time: "David Geffen said 'Your music, I don't care, do what you want. Just give me three great videos and you'll be a star.' Did we ever give him three videos ? Yes, but they weren't great. We needed someone at that time to give us a kick up the arse."

Begging You features in the 1996 film, 'Boys'.

 

Left: Begging You CD front cover.
Right: Begging You CD back cover.

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