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5 hours ago
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Brian Molko, singer, songwriter
Nancy Boy was about reclaiming the homophobic insults that were hurled at me every time I went out because I had long hair and wore eyeliner and nail polish. I’d walk into a bar and people would react vociferously, or guys would think I was a girl then get really aggressive when they found out my name was Brian. I thought I could regain some power by writing a celebration of debauchery that was so brazenly sexual it would piss off the people who insulted me even more.
Also, [Suede singer] Brett Anderson had recently told NME he was a “bisexual man who’d never had a homosexual experience”, which I thought was bollocks. I thought he was being a sexual tourist. We know each other now and he’s a fantastic person – back then we all said cheeky things for effect – but part of my motivation was to write a song about a bisexual man who has had a bisexual experience.
I was living on income support in Deptford, London, when I came up with the chorus, but I thought the chords were too catchy or mainstream. I wasn’t sure if I liked them, but when I played them round at Stefan’s – he lived with his parents – he said: “Man, that’s such a hook.” In the rehearsal room it became this distorted punk thing.
The words almost wrote themselves. I was trying to tell a story of a wild night out, so started: “Alcoholic kind of mood, lose my clothes, lose my lube.” It was the kind of night we’d have on rare occasions but it certainly wasn’t our lives yet. “Had some help from insect ways” is a reference to Spanish Fly or any substance that made you horny – you could buy GHB in shops then. The line: “Eyeholes in a paper bag, greatest lay I’ve ever had” was also reclaiming an insult, because at school people would point at girls and say: “I wouldn’t fuck her with a paper bag on her head.” I was a very green songwriter and they’re not my best lyrics.
When we recorded Nancy Boy for our debut album it just didn’t have our live energy. So we re-recorded it with Phil Vinall. Phil enabled us to turn up the distortion. When we performed it on Top of the Pops there were 43 complaints because people couldn’t work out what gender I was. This song changed everything for us and had a purpose: it made people who felt like outsiders feel less lonely, and they became our audience.
Stefan Olsdal, bass, songwriter
In 1994, when we wrote Nancy Boy, I was in an illegal relationship, because I was 19 and the age of consent was still 21 for gay men. That was probably in the ether for Nancy Boy, then when I heard Brian’s chords I was hooked. I was interested in the idea of wrapping dark, subversive or explicitly sexual lyrics in something quite melodic.
We made a demo in Deptford, hiring the studio between midnight and 6am because it was cheaper, and the tape somehow found its way on to David Bowie’s tour bus. We ended up supporting him before we’d even made our debut album. Then when the first proper recording of Nancy Boy wasn’t right we tried overdubbing fast drums to bring some energy, but it didn’t have a punch. By the time we recorded it again we had more live experience and were so pissed off about the first version that the energy went into the well-known one.
I still don’t know how it got on the radio, but maybe the play on words helped us get away with it. There are no expletives in Nancy Boy and I certainly don’t remember us saying: “We can’t sing this – we’ll be in trouble!” When we started touring, we got the shit kicked out of us in Middlesbrough, and in the conservative southern States of the US supporting Weezer we were pelted with coins, but mostly we were embraced. The song’s success brought us a lot of freedom. As human beings discovering who they were in the public eye, it gave us a lot of confidence, and artistically we realised we could push at boundaries and didn’t have to pander to any expectations. Nancy Boy is a snapshot of a moment, but 30 years later it’s very much a part of who we are.
