Songfacts®:

• Placebo frontman Brian Molko told Melody Maker this deceptively cheerful-sounding song "is about the intense emotions you feel as a teenager the way you have a tendency to close yourself a bit, create your own little world. You're an adult trapped in a kid's body - you want to break out but everyone still treats you as a kid."
• This is the third single from Placebo's self-titled debut album, which propelled the English alt-rock band to #5 on the UK albums chart when its subsequent single, "Nancy Boy," hit the radio.
• In the chorus, Molko sings, "Since I was born, I started to decay." He told Vox the inspiration behind the morbid lyric. "Well, that was something my mother said to me," he explained in the 1996 interview. "She was talking about aging, wrinkling, skin drying up and stuff. This was when I was about 14. She said that as soon as you pop out of the womb you start to deteriorate. I actually found her words quite disturbing but, y'know, she's a religious kind of person."
• Molko spoke about his teen years in a 1996 interview with the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. He said: "When I was a teenager, I felt things in more passionate ways, I've gone through rebellion phases. I was feeling depressed, I felt like the world was about to collapse. A sort of alienation towards parents, a rebellion against what they wanted me to become, against growing, going through this kind of changes. My emotions were going in many directions because physically, I was becoming an adult. I was longing for it, but I was still dealt with as a child. Art and creativity were minor things, unknown in my family. That's surely for that reason, I reacted so violently. I became the ugly duckling: My father wanted me to become a businessman, and my mother wanted me to be a saint. Finally, I satisfied none of them. At this age, music can represent many things, be the last emergency exit. Playing guitar was a sort of outlet to my family troubles, to authority. My parents didn't contribute at all to what I am today and that's marvelous. I am here today only by myself. I need to have success, very selfishly, to refute all the people who thought I would not go far in life, to show it to the people who were better than me at school, my rivals in every way, my parents."
• In the music video, helmed by commercial director Trevor Robinson, Placebo perform inside of a giant box in the middle of a field. Other young people find their way to the mysterious cube and make their way inside. Some immediately feel trapped and try to get out, while others hold up signs that display the song lyrics. Some display their acts of rebellion, with one boy shaving his head, a girl showing off her tongue piercing, and another girl covering her entire face in bright red lipstick. It was a tough shoot for Molko, who was suffering from tonsillitis.
• This is the only Placebo album featuring drummer Robert Schultzberg, who was let go shortly after the album was released due to conflicts with Molko. He was replaced by Steve Hewitt.