Sometimes with music things are hidden in plain sight. I find it fascinating that you can be perfectly familiar with a song but then you come back to it at a later time and it impacts you in a way you never would have expected. In this case, Shaft has always been a perfectly good song, not a standout, but I revisit it now and it turns out it’s my favourite song on the album.

It writhes with nervous energy – a mounting panic attack. The rhythm section is brazen, unyielding, while Mike’s guitar needles insidiously. Brandon vocals almost portray a battle between inner and outer monologue; melodically the verses are an increasingly futile attempt to maintain composure until the chorus’ break down into a catharsis of yells, overlaid with a lamenting “We can’t let you go”. It’s this to-ing and fro-ing that makes the song so compelling, pushing everything along to its final crescendo of a chorus, the temperature rising continuously until the whole pan boils over.

Lyrically I’ve never understood what the song is actually about. It has always sounded like nonsense, albeit a different kind of nonsense to something like Take Me To Your Leader. Rather than irreverence, Shaft initially presents itself as something sincere, something meaningful.  Perhaps this is merely down to the fact that Brandon delivers it in a far more natural voice than the Mike Patton pastiche found throughout the rest of Fungus/Enjoy. But what do we find when we put the lyrics under scrutiny, and most pressingly, who is Lorena and why do they need her? Well it would seem that the Lorena in question is Lorena Bobbitt, who made headlines in the early nineties when she cut her abusive husband’s penis off while he slept and disposed of it on the side of a road. While the bulk of Shaft’s lyrics give the impression of a claustrophobic identity crisis, evidently this isn’t actually the early emergence of Philosophical Brandon, whom we become well acquainted with in later albums. No, apparently the song is simply the chronicle of a teenage boy’s relationship with his genitals, which frankly is a subject I feel no need to delve any deeper into. But at least now I can be sure that the eponymous shaft is, well, a shaft. Like I say, sometimes things are hidden in plain sight.