“A Girl Like You” by Edwyn Collins

"A Girl Like You" is Edwyn Collins at his coolest: a strutting, fuzzed-up stomp from Gorgeous George, his third solo album, that Setanta Records put out as a single in December 1994. The Scotsman did it nearly all himself, writing words and music, producing, and engineering and mixing it alongside Sebastian Lewsley, and you can hear one man's taste all over it.

It sounds like a retro soul single left too close to the radiator: a loping groove, a rasping, sputtering guitar hook and Collins crooning in a deadpan baritone, sounding equal parts smitten and suspicious. It's cool without trying and catchy without begging.

The world bit. It climbed to number four in the UK, went all the way to the top in Flanders and Iceland, and made the top 10 in Australia, France, Germany and Sweden. It got two different videos, one directed by John Flansburgh and another by Gavin Evans, and at the end of 1995 NME's writers put it at 38 among the year's singles while Spin ranked it number eight. Uniting Nations later sampled it for "Everything About You".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.