"Join Hands" was written over a period of six months. In 1979, the band watched news reports from Iran, including scenes of repression and curfews; it was one of the first times they had seen images of people being shot and killed on television. In England, the political situation was also unstable, with rubbish piling up in the streets of London. Siouxsie Sioux saw it as "a real time, everything in flux and uncertain but also festering underneath, and because this stuff from the past that was just left there rotting there and it needed to be acknowledged and then cleaned up, not just swept away still rotting". The band were inspired by these events. The theme of war emerged through the songs: rather than a pro-military message, the lyrics were meant to capture the spirit of what things were like at the time. Miranda Sawyer stated that "Join Hands" took "the very un-rock'n'roll topic of World War I as its inspiration".