The Asphalt World: Growing Up on Tarmac and Songs – An Essay by Neal Reid

editors note: As soon as I saw Neal’s text about The Asphalt World on The Mild Ones – a group I’m also part of – I was hooked. The Asphalt World is very special for me, and the only song I always know how to play on the guitar, albeit on my own lo-fi stripped down way. It instantly felt like his essay belonged on Mondo.

The Asphalt World: Growing Up on Tarmac and Songs

by Neal Reid

Some thoughts I had on The Asphalt World.

I come from a very working-class background. I grew up in inner city Birmingham. It’s hard to really express how boring it was to live where I did, much like Haywards Heath was for Mat and Bernard. There was absolutely nothing to do but get pissed or off your tits, which is what we did most of the time. No café culture of restaurants, just booze and drugs, which were everywhere you looked and in everyone we knew. Gossip about who could get what was gold dust, but it was always the older kids who got anything good. As kids, me and my mates couldn’t afford to buy drugs or booze much, so we innovated. We used to sniff butane (lighter fuel), glue, and even deodorant cans through a towel over the top to get high off the fumes. Brett’s songs are laden with drug references and Asphalt World is no exception.

The song reminds me of where I grew up. The connection is primal, it’s not a higher order function, like choosing Asphalt World over Things Can Only Get Better by D-ream for instance. It touches me somewhere deep.

Lots of people lead idyllic lives by the coast, like my best friend who is from South West Wales. Kids would play in streams and swim in the sea and build huts in the woods. We did some of that, of course, Birmingham being famous for its canals if nothing else, but my most vivid memory of my young life is the smell of Tarmac, aka asphalt. It seemed to be with me all the time as progress increasingly drove, quite literally, through our green spaces.

The lyrics themselves seemed impossibly glamorous and ethereal to my 20 year old mind:

I know a girl, she walks the asphalt world
She comes to me, I supply her with ecstasy
Sometimes we ride in a taxi to the ends of the city
Like big stars in the back seat, like skeletons, ever so pretty

The very idea of getting a 7-minute taxi into town was a bit glamorous. We used to walk there and home regularly, although if we were feeling particularly flush, we’d get the bus. The idea that we could ‘fly in a taxi, to the ends of the city, like big stars in the back seat’ was inconceivable, especially as the literal read of that line has the protagonists buying real drugs. ‘I supply her ecstasy.’

The lyrics are so sensual and Brett’s voice gradually increases in urgency; it’s a winter night’s quest for possibly illicit sex, ‘how does she feel when she’s next to you’ and ultimately “the sex turns cruel”; the perilous pursuit of risky drugs and using them for said sex; the guitar, bass and drums turning more frantic, once gentle guitar lines become swirling confusion as the cab speeds up, the racing rhythm section pounding to near panic attack levels as the city lights whoosh by and light the scene, ‘like skeletons, ever so pretty’.

Looking up the train tracks for life.

The Asphalt World lyrics:

I know a girl, she walks the asphalt world
She comes to me, I supply her with ecstasy
Sometimes we ride in a taxi to the ends of the city
Like big stars in the back seat, like skeletons, ever so pretty
I know a girl, she walks the asphalt world

But where does she go and what does she do?
And how does she feel when she’s next to you?
And who does she love in her time honoured fur?
Is it me or her?

I know a girl, she walks the asphalt world
She’s got a friend, they share mascara, I pretend
Sometimes they fly from the covers to the winter of the river
For these silent stars of the cinema, it’s in the bloodstream, it’s in the liver
I know a girl, she walks the arse-felt world

But where does she go and what does she do?
And how does she feel when she’s next to you?
And who does she love in her time honoured fur?
Is it me or her?
With ice in her blood and a dove in her head
Well, how does she feel when she’s in your bed?
When you’re there in her arms and there in her legs
Well, I’ll be in her head
‘Cause that’s where I go and that’s what I do
And that’s how it feels when the sex turns cruel
Yes, both of us need her, this is the asphalt world

With ice in her blood and a dove in her head
Well, how does she feel when she’s in your bed?
When you’re there in her arms and there in her legs
Well, I’ll be in her head
‘Cause that’s where I go and that’s what I do
And that’s how it feels when the sex turns cruel
Yes, both of us need her, this is the asphalt world

Essay originally posted by Neal Reid on The Mild Ones – Suede Fan Group Facebook account on December 29 2025.