Lead vocalist Noddy Holder, in his 1999 biography, recalled of the song's failure: "When it didn't make the charts, frustration started to set in. We couldn't understand why we weren't more popular by then. We had been with Chas for two years, slogging our guts out and still we hadn't had a hit." Speaking to Goodtimes Magazine in 2015, bassist Jim Lea recalled: "We had no hits. Songs such as "Know Who You Are" or "Shape of Things to Come" were played on the radio only very infrequently." Afterwards, the band dropped their skinhead image and would achieve their commercial breakthrough with their mid-1971 single "Get Down and Get with It".
"Know Who You Are" developed from the band's 1969 track "Genesis", which was an instrumental written by the band and released as a single from Beginnings. During sessions for Play It Loud, the band revisited the song, with drummer Don Powell writing the lyrics. In his 2013 biography, Powell recalled: ""Know Who You Are" is the same as our old instrumental "Genesis", so Nod and Dave are credited for that one as well as Jim and myself. I wrote the lyrics for it and some of them are about Dave. I don't know how it came about, but the first line that I came up with was "H, old babe, sing a song to make out that your playing is easy.""
Release
"Know Who You Are" was released on 7" vinyl by Polydor Records in the UK only. The B-side, "Dapple Rose", was written by Lea and Powell. Also included on Play It Loud, Powell recalled of his lyrics in a 2009 fan forum interview: "I've always had a fondness for horses and where I lived with my parents there were some fields over the back and there were always gypsies camping there. They used to have these horses and donkeys and they always looked dead to me. They were not looked after which was sad."
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