This is the original single version (another three-inch CD) of Sit Down — the one that wasn't a hit in 1989. When the hit version came out a couple of years later, I ignored it with studied hauteur, natürlich. (And I'm not even going to mention the 1998 version.)
This was before I had the money to buy almost every version of everything they did. Just this one three-inch cost £3.99 at 1989 prices.
The version of Sit Down on this CD sounds a little thin, perhaps because its successor is more familiar, and it goes on for over eight minutes, including a few minutes of keyboard-led instrumental break and a silly coda. Wikipedia touches on the people — Patti Smith and Doris Lessing — whom Tim Booth is "relieved to hear" have "been to some far out places". The reason he's relieved, as I remember it from Stuart Maconie's Folklore biography, is that Smith's and Lessing's reports from the psycho-cultural frontline meant that the rest of us don't need to experience that dangerous territory ourselves.
The other three songs on the disc are typical James spiky agit-doggerel of the time, featuring barbed comments about global corporations and the environment in the days when it was only just beginning to become clichéd.
I said before that James were still a four-piece band when this and its follow-up Come Home were first released, but now I think I may be wrong about that, because there's violin on Sky is Falling.
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 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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