Tenderness

Dave Wakeling, who sang and played guitar in General Public, told Songfacts about writing this song: "I used to like traveling with the trucks that carried the gear. I'd always been a big fan of that TV show Cannonball when I was a kid, and thought that the idea of American trucks was very romantic. So when we came on tour, I used to love to drive overnight with the truck drivers and talk rubbish on the CB in there. And so it was as if the trucks were driving in what's called 'the endless gray river.' And the notion was that you were driving around in there in America searching for the tenderness, whereas, of course, it's in your heart all the time. So it's like you're looking in the outside world for something that can only be discovered in yourself, because love is a verb, not a noun. That was the notion of it."

General Public was formed by Wakeling and Ranking Roger, who were members of The English Beat, along with Mickey Billingham and Stoker from Dexys Midnight Runners and Horace Panter from The Specials. This started as an English Beat song, but never made it. Says Wakeling: "We tried to get rehearsals set, and it was one of the reasons that we knew that The Beat had really come to its end: where I was before, everything had gone very smoothly and magically without even trying. It was now almost nigh impossible to get rehearsals together. Somebody would have something to do in the morning, so they couldn't be there until 2, and somebody else has go tot leave at 2:30 because they've got a meeting to go at 3, and they couldn't do Thursday, what about next week? And on and on and on. And it was hard for us to get anything done. I think we managed two rehearsals, perhaps, for that third album."

Wakeling talks about the lyrics, "Whistling in the graveyard": "It was a phrase of my father's when I would disagree with him and try to stand up to him as I was growing old. He'd be like, 'You're just whistling in the graveyard.' So it was like he was accusing me of a false sense of courage, like I was trying to act more bravely. I think the phrase was actually whistling past the graveyard. He said it to me as, 'Oh, you're just whistling in the graveyard.' I actually stick quite a lot of my dad's little phrases and witticisms in songs. And I suppose in Birmingham they had a sort of colloquial history that most people's dads would have said to them. But it was trying to build up a false sense of courage and call up your girlfriend, knowing whatever it was that she was going to catch you at because you weren't telling the truth."