“Connection” by Elastica

"Connection" is the song that carried Elastica across the Atlantic, a wiry, whip-smart single from their self-titled 1995 debut. Justine Frischmann wrote it, Marc Waterman produced and engineered it, and Alan Moulder mixed it for Deceptive Records into a burst of Britpop with the fat trimmed off.

It opens on a bleeping synthesizer line (Damon Albarn later said he played it on a Yamaha QY10, a handheld sequencer) that the guitars then pick up and grind into a riff, and the vocal arrives as a cool, clipped sneer that sounds bored and thrilled at once. That riff is also where the trouble started: it was lifted from the guitar part of Wire's "Three Girl Rhumba", moved down a semitone. The dispute ended in a settlement out of court, and the songwriting credits were rewritten.

It got to number 17 on the UK Singles Chart, but its real feat was in North America, where few Britpop songs made any headway: number two on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks, number 53 on the Hot 100 and number nine in Canada. Jonathan Perry of The Phoenix later picked it for his rundown of the '90s' 90 finest songs, borrowed riff and all.

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