#14 - Nancy Boy - Placebo

Possibly the most important song on this mixtape as one of my all time favourites soundtracking my college years, a time which saw me being able to move on from being the small fat kid who got beat up everyday at school partly because of my place in the social order but also because I ran my mouth all the time and seemed to relish in the choas of pissing the wrong people off. Regardless college meanwhile was the place were you got to celebrate your quirks and more importantly find the tribes which represented yourself which for myself was the skater punks, movie nerds and horror junkies.

It was seeing the the MTV bumper "Verebrae" which sampled the song which not only introduced me to the song, but also in many ways painted out the path I wanted to follow. To be the kid with the big headphones following thier own path....the chipped nail paint never happened.

A key track for the band as the band's forth single it became a suprise hit entering the charts at #4 and pushing the album from #40 to #5 though the boy photographed for it's cover would claim that it ruined his life attempting to sue the band in 2012 compared to the kid who was the baby on the cover of Nirvana's "Nevermind" who admited he used it as a way to pick up girls.

For a song which was fuel for so much change in my own world view the song also looks at change as lead singer Brain Molko explained

"People who think it's fashionable to be gay-guys who think that because some of my best friends are gay that they are going to try it out because they are in a milieu where it's cool, but they haven't actually had the desire themselves. In the song, I'm questioning people's reasons for sleeping with someone of the same sex. In the same way that heroin is very hip today, being bisexual seems to be very chic." It's an exploration into somebody's misogyny yet heartfelt. It's angry, nasty, insulting and completely politically incorrect."

To this extent you could put the song next to The BloodHound Gang's "I Wish I was Queer So I Could Get Chicks" but at the time these lyrics went completly over my head as the refrences to drugs, sex, gender confusion and bisexuality were instead lost in the noisescape the band create here as like so much music I tend to focus more on the sound than the words, but even viewed in this way there are devious lines like "Eyeholes in a paper bag/greatest lay I ever had" which only add to the song.

The video directed by Howard Greenhalgh who blurred Drummer Steve Hewitt's face due to him still being under contact to another band while having the band look like they are playing in a Clive Barker disco with the combination of disemboded limbs, spikes and melded bodies which while lacking the budget Greenhalgh would have no doubt have liked to run with for this surreal vision still creates one which melds with song taking you on a journey from wondering what the hell your watching to an almost strange sense of acceptance once it's finished as Greenhalgh brings his approach of drawing from the song lyrics to create this memorable video.

Greenhalgh while a name which might not leap out as the most recognisable despite his work promently featuring throughout the 90's would also create videos for the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, Muse and Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" which won him a reader's choice award for best video by Spin magazine.

While the band might care about the song for years excluding it from thier sets, it's still one of my favourites of their backcatalogue and while I might not still be the same rebel without a clue I was in my college days it still taps into a good place whenever I hear it.
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