Maquiladora

from shindig to the border

Its first form is “The Greatest Shindig of the World”, from the four-track tape the band made in 1990 under the name Shindig, which surfaced online in 2006. An early version called “Without You” was among the On a Friday recordings that leaked in 2002, and the 2003 version of this site said it went by that name until 1995, noting that the publisher, Warner Chappell, had it down as “Shindig”.

A maquiladora is a factory on the Mexican side of the border, assembling goods duty-free for the United States. The song takes that as its title and uses it to look at touring America, with the band cast, unflatteringly, as useless English rockers passing through.

two years early

The archive's first night for it is Egham on 13 January 1993, two years before it came out. At the Royal Berks Hospital Social Club in Reading on 21 February 1994 it opened the show with different words, and that August, at Gloucester, it was written on the setlist as “Interstate 5”. Of its twenty-one nights, fourteen were in 1994, the year it was one of the new songs at the Reading Festival and went into a Radio 1 Evening Session recorded at Maida Vale. In 1997 it came back in August, and was played at the fan-club night at the London Astoria that September, and the last of it was Hanover on 10 November 1997.

the b-side

It went out on the “High and Dry” / “Planet Telex” single in February 1995. A live version from the London Astoria on 27 May 1994 was on the Live at the Astoria video the next month, and on a three-song promotional CD of the same name that EMI France pressed that year, not for sale. It is loud, guitar-heavy and much rougher than anything on The Bends. The 2003 site filed it among the great songs left as B-sides, and recommended it to anyone who loved Pablo Honey and had trouble with The Bends.