In THE IPCRESS FILE, Michael Caine plays an army sergeant who becomes a spy in order to work off a black-marketeering background. Through the film, his loyalty is torn between two department heads, he accidentally kills a CIA agent, and he becomes brainwashed to become a mind-controlled sleeper agent, meant to kill one of the department heads upon hearing a trigger word. So his loyalties are complicated, to say the least.
"Michael Caine" the song concerns informers within the Provisional IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a hot subject at the time--a major news story was about Sean O'Callaghan, an informer who foiled an IRA bomb plot to injure Princess Diana at a Duran Duran concert. As I see it, the song's "He" is the informer. By the second verse he has done his doublecross ("sacrifice his pride"), and by the third verse is a paranoid wreck living under an assumed name. And Michael Caine is used as a representation of the informer's questionable, distrustful nature.
In THE IPCRESS FILE, Michael Caine plays an army sergeant who becomes a spy in order to work off a black-marketeering background. Through the film, his loyalty is torn between two department heads, he accidentally kills a CIA agent, and he becomes brainwashed to become a mind-controlled sleeper agent, meant to kill one of the department heads upon hearing a trigger word. So his loyalties are complicated, to say the least.
"Michael Caine" the song concerns informers within the Provisional IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a hot subject at the time--a major news story was about Sean O'Callaghan, an informer who foiled an IRA bomb plot to injure Princess Diana at a Duran Duran concert. As I see it, the song's "He" is the informer. By the second verse he has done his doublecross ("sacrifice his pride"), and by the third verse is a paranoid wreck living under an assumed name. And Michael Caine is used as a representation of the informer's questionable, distrustful nature.