“Berlin Chair” by You Am I

"Berlin Chair" came off You Am I's Sound as Ever as its second single in 1994, a song Tim Rogers started while living in Chippendale in Sydney and finished with Andy Kent and Mark Tunaley. The title comes from the Berlin chair by the Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld, a piece Rogers had come across years before in Canberra; biographer Craig Mathieson reads the chair as a picture of the hard, closed-off male edge the song's narrator shows his girlfriend. Lee Ranaldo produced it for rooArt and mixed it with Wayne Connolly.

It barely scraped into the ARIA singles chart, but Triple J listeners adopted it for life: number 23 in that year's Hottest 100, then 61 and 52 in the all-time polls of 1998 and 2009, and in 1999 a phone-in vote named it the best Australian song of the 1990s.

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