Expert: Laura - 4/11/2005

Question
Hi ! IMy best frien and I are doing an anylisis on the Glycerine by bush for our english class disagreeing on the meaning and message of the song and we thought a 3rd opinion would help us out! thank you so much

Answer
Literally glycerine means : glycerine [n.] it's short for nitroglycerine, a highly explosive substance... which I believe Gavin was trying to infer that his relationship with 'Jasmine' (his girlfriend at the time) was rather explosive or doomed.

Here are some quotes from the band themselves about the song, they can better explain it than me.

"I was trying to be involved with someone who (a) didn't want me to be involved with her and (b) couldn't be involved with me because her life was too busy and too full for me. It's about the magic of love and loss."- Gavin

"It's nitroglycerine, as opposed to hand soap. I'm fascinated by an inanimate object that can cause so much destruction. It can sit there like a fat ward, and then it blows up..."- Gavin

“ ‘Glycerine' was one of those ten-minute songs. Sometimes they'd flow just like that, and it felt brilliant to be able to write that way. It's such a good purging. It's a song about the impossible - about things that can't work out; about when you really want things to work, but you know in your heart that they can't. It's funny at the time, they weren't even sure they were going to release ‘Glycerine' [as a single to radio]. But when the did, things just flipped. I'm sad it didn't really get on the radio here, but I really enjoy singing it live and performing it solo. It's the weird sort of perverse test, a nightly test. To see if I can do it.” - Gavin


"Glycerine was a gift of the moment -- a gift of a song that sort of forced itself on me. it just flowed and i wrote it pretty much in one go."- Gavin

"kay, with the strings on glycerine, um, the idea behind it was just to catch this quite sad song so the idea was to catch, capture that. Um, and the end piece was sort of inspired cause my father died when we started making the album and so I sorta wrote a little piece I thought just to sort of, as a tribute almost. So we just tagged that onto the end of it."-Nigel

Good luck on your paper.
Laura