Songfacts®:

• "I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)," written by Sandi Thom and Tom Gilbert (possibly a pseudonym for her manager, Ian Brown), is an idealistic paean to a simpler, lo-tech age when people cared enough to form movements such as "flower power" in 1969 and punk rock in 1977.
  
  The song is a historical marker as one of the first to lament the fast-moving advancement of digital technology in the 2010s. This was a time of flip phones, when social media was in it's infancy - the tech savvy may have had a Friendster or Myspace account.
• The inspiration for the song came to Sandi Thom when after her mobile phone was lost she thought how simple life was when we weren't so reliant on technology, "When not everybody drove a car, when music really mattered, and radio was king."
  
  Speaking on the Australian program The Morning Show, Thom said: "I was living in this little bedsit in South London, and it was fairly depressing. I had my phone, and it was one of those flip phones. I lost it, and it hit me so hard because it was my lifeline to my family, my friends. I looked around for a payphone that worked and I couldn't find one - they were all destroyed. So I started writing these lyrics about back in the day when things were more simple. At that time the digital revolution was taking place so it was a really big change. I just longed for that simplistic life again filled with these innocent things."
• Sandi Thom was billed as the first artist discovered by a major label via a webcast, a claim that appears to be a publicity stunt.
  
  This song was originally released as a CD single on Viking Legacy records in October 2005, but it went nowhere. She was then signed to Sony, which circulated the story that a series of webcasts Thom played from her Tooting basement flat had gone viral, garnering an audience of 70,000 and getting the attention of an executive at the label, who signed her.
  
  This story is largely embellished (she did do webcasts, but there's no way she put up those kind of numbers), but the story was circulated and ginned up interest in the song. It was championed by BBC Radio 2, and a fortnight after its re-release, replaced Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" at the top of the UK chart. It also spent 10 weeks at #1 in Australia, and finished the year as the country's highest selling single. Other countries where it topped the chart include Ireland and Sweden.
• This was especially successful in Australia, where it topped the ARIA for 10 weeks and was the country's highest selling single of 2006.
• The music video, directed by Mark Adcock, was shot in one take using a Steadicam that followed Thom on a London street. The footage changes speeds at different times, so Thom had to sing it faster or slower at various points to compensate. This was low-budget production, so the lip-sync is way off, but for the money spent it's a very memorable clip.