 The song's verses list a number of occupations that the narrator could have taken, including driver, poet, teacher and soldier, even an inmate in a long-term institution and the ticket man at Fulham Broadway tube station.The chorus reveals that instead he chose to "play the fool in a six-piece band", highlighting some of its disadvantages, particularly loneliness, before deciding that "rock 'n' roll don't mind".The song was written with Rod Melvin in mid-1975, two years before its eventual release.