her recollection of the car and the men's voices, is how the police identified them. The police eventually stopped the car and found the cassette was still in the machine, with the same distinctive song on the tape." In his 2009 autobiography Memoirs of a Geezer, Jah Wobble says that Poptones refers to "a journey we took in Joe the roadie's Japanese car [..] and Joe had one of his dodgy cassettes playing.". He highlighted the song as "the jewel in the PiL crown. [...] That [bass] line is as symmetrical as a snowflake. [..] We had a drummer with us who was pretty good [...] but the bloke just couldn't get the right feel for 'Poptones'. [...] In the end Levene put the drums down on that track, his drums are a bit loose, but that is actually a good thing." Wobble cited "Careering" as his "second-favourite track from Metal Box, and probably my favourite John Lydon vocal performance." Lyrically, the song is "basically about a gunman [in Northern Ireland] who is careering as a professional businessman in London." The song was recorded at the Townhouse during a quick nighttime session helmed by Wobble; he told journalist Simon Reynolds in an interview: "If you listen to the drum rhythm it is very similar to the sort of rhythm a drum and fife band would create. [...] By now Keith had got hold of a Prophet synth, he used that on 'Careering'." Wobble created the drum track and bassline, while Levene played synth. Levene explained his synth playing in the song was an attempt to replicate the sound of ambient machine noise heard from a downstairs toilet, achieved by dropping an item on one of the synth keys to keep it going. "No Birds Do Sing" (also listed as just "No Birds") features a line from "La Belle Dame sans Merci", a poem by John Keats, which Lydon "just borrowed a bit of because it suited this particular rant about suburbia." The song was recorded at the Townhouse with drummer Richard Dudanski, whom Keith Levene knew during his tenure with The 101ers. Wobble said that Dudanski made extensive and imaginative use of the tom-tom drums, and Levene told Simon Reynolds that "No Birds" is one of his favourite songs on the album. "All that it is is me playing the guitar part and duplicating it, but feeding the second one