One Thing Leads to Another

The guitar riff that opens this song is one of the most precise instruments of tension in the new wave era — angular, repetitive, slightly off-kilter in its rhythmic placement, it establishes a mood of barely-suppressed anxiety before anything else arrives. The rhythm section drives relentlessly forward beneath it, a mechanical urgency that suggests a world moving faster than anyone can actually process. Cy Curnin's voice carries a quality of strained composure, someone delivering information calmly while internally registering alarm — the control in the delivery makes the content more unsettling, not less. The Fixx were operating in a post-punk moment when paranoia about geopolitics, media manipulation, and systemic deception was becoming mainstreamed as pop subject matter, and this track captures that cultural atmosphere with unusual efficiency. The lyrics describe a world where consequences chain invisibly into each other, where small actions generate vast and uncontrollable outcomes — a systems-thinking anxiety dressed in new wave clothes. This is music for driving through cities at night when the infrastructure seems both impressive and threatening, when the lights and signals and invisible flows of information feel like evidence of something you don't fully understand but can't stop moving through.