Teenage Angst

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."