XTC / Drums and Wires (Bonus Track Version) / 1979
Complicated Game
dry, anxious resignation with a mounting sense of dread
XTC turn a simple left-or-right gesture into a running metaphor for political and existential futility. Over a tense, angular arrangement, the song insists that choice itself is a kind of decoration -- whichever direction you pick, some larger unseen force will rearrange it anyway.
political disillusionment futility of choice powerlessness free will vs determinism alienation
Who's speaking
An unnamed narrator addresses a series of figures -- himself, a child, a voter, and finally God -- functioning almost as an oracle or cynical bystander who keeps repeating the same flat verdict regardless of who asks.
What happens
The song moves in escalating steps: it opens with a trivial, almost absurd personal dilemma (which way to point a finger), then widens to a child's harmless choice about her hair, then to a young man's vote, then to political puppets paraded for show, and finally to God himself facing the same left-or-right dilemma about the world. Each time the answer is identical -- it doesn't matter, someone else will move it anyway -- so the accumulation turns a joke into a bleak cosmology.
How it's built
Built on a repeating call-and-response verse pattern (question, question, answer, refrain) that barely varies lyrically, which is the point: the sameness of the structure enacts the sameness the lyrics describe. A stark middle section breaks the pattern to name two political figures being manipulated, functioning as the song's closest thing to a bridge before the pattern resumes and finally dissolves into repeated fragments of the refrain, as if the machinery is still grinding after the argument has run out.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song starts with a deliberately trivial dilemma, almost a joke, establishing the call-and-response pattern and the dismissive answer that will recur throughout.left, no left, no.
Second verse, the little girl
Shifting to a child's innocent question personalizes the theme, moving the metaphor from the narrator's private indecision to something taught to the next generation, as if futility itself is being passed down.'somenothing
Third verse, the little boy and the vote
“should he put his vote upon”
This is where the metaphor turns explicitly political -- the earlier hair-parting whimsy is revealed as a rehearsal for the song's real target, the idea that democratic choice is as arbitrary and reversible as picking a direction.
Middle section, Tom and Joe
“arrows in a very bad aim”
The two named figures read as stand-ins for interchangeable political candidates, propped up for spectacle rather than substance; the archery image suggests effort and aim that never actually connects with anything meaningful.
Final verse, God
“God asked me should he ought”
Escalating the dilemma to a divine scale is the song's boldest move -- if even God is subject to the same shrugging answer, there's no vantage point outside the game from which order or meaning could be imposed.
Closing repetitions
The refrain breaks down into stuttering fragments rather than resolving, mimicking a record skipping or a thought trailing into exhaustion, leaving the listener with the mechanism running rather than a conclusion.
Craft
- escalating parallelism
- The same left/right question is recycled across increasingly weighty subjects -- a finger, a hairstyle, a vote, a world -- so the structure itself argues that trivial and cosmic choices are treated identically by whatever force is really in control.
- extended metaphor
- Left and right stand in for political direction, personal decision, and cosmic order simultaneously, letting the song glide between the mundane and the theological without changing its terms.
- refrain as fatalism
- The repeated closing line functions less as a chorus hook than as a shrug delivered as doctrine, reinforcing that the song's worldview is static and inescapable.
- personification/escalation to God
- By putting God in the same bind as a child choosing a hairstyle, the song deflates any appeal to higher authority as an escape from the game's rules.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a piece of late-70s political disenchantment: written amid punk-era skepticism toward electoral politics, it argues that voting, like a child's hairstyle, is a gesture whose meaningfulness is illusory because power structures reassert themselves regardless of individual choice. A secondary reading pushes further into existentialism -- by dragging God into the same trap, the song suggests a more universal determinism, where even a creator has no real agency over ultimate outcomes. Both readings agree on the core claim: the appearance of choice is a comforting fiction laid over a fixed and arbitrary system.
Context
Released in 1979 on Drums and Wires, this song sits within XTC's angular, nervy new wave period, written by Colin Moulding. The late-70s British context -- economic anxiety, shifting party politics, and punk's broader disillusionment with institutions -- plausibly informs the song's skepticism toward voting and authority, though I can't confirm specific biographical intent behind the lyric beyond what the text itself supports.
Listen for
- the way the question-and-answer verse structure barely changes even as the stakes rise from personal to political to cosmic
- the tense, clipped guitar and rhythm section underscoring the sense of mechanical repetition
- the brief break into naming actual figures in the middle eight, disrupting the song's otherwise abstract pattern
- the deliberate anticlimax of the ending, where the refrain fragments instead of resolving
About XTC
XTC were an English rock band formed in Swindon in 1972. Fronted by songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding, the band gained popularity during the rise of punk and new wave in the 1970s, later playing in a variety of styles that ranged from angular guitar riffs to elaborately arranged pop.
1976 - 2006 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue