“War Baby” by Tom Robinson

"War Baby" was Tom Robinson's way back from the brink, a 1983 single that climbed to No. 6 in the UK and later found a home on his 1984 album Hope and Glory. After Sector 27 fell apart he was broke, technically bankrupt, deep in debt to the taxman and depressed with it, so in 1982 he decamped to a friend's place in Hamburg, learned German and started gigging there, East Berlin included, alongside the East German band NO 55.

The song poured out of him in one stoned rush, set off by an unhappy visit to a gay sauna: eight to ten handwritten pages of stream-of-consciousness that took about a year to whittle down to something he could sing in four minutes. What survived has been read as a song about living with the divide between East and West Germany. Robinson produced it himself.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.