Connection

Frischmann wrote it and the band produced. It came out on October 10, 1994 on Deceptive as a 7-inch, 12-inch, CD and cassette, in Australia on Geffen on February 20, 1995 and to US radio on April 18, 1995, at 2:21 as a single and 2:22 on the album, where Damon Albarn adds keyboards. Songfacts quotes Welch saying the song was built around its riff, which Far Out says was made on a keyboard; Wikipedia cites a 2023 interview in which Albarn mentions the synth intro on a Yamaha QY10, a claim we could not confirm from the cited page. B-sides were "See That Animal", "Blue" (a demo of Matthews's) and "Spastica", and the European CD carried Peel session versions of "Rockunroll" and "Annie".

The intro synth part, later a guitar figure, is the riff of Wire's "Three Girl Rhumba" (Pink Flag, 1977) transposed down a semitone, according to Wikipedia, which says there was an out-of-court settlement and credits were rewritten; Songfacts and Far Out say Wire received no credit, and the album's tracklist credits only Frischmann and Elastica. Polly Brewster says the band never denied the borrowing, calling it homage. The album article calls the lyric deliberately ambiguous about selling out in romance or in the music industry; Frischmann never fully explained it. In the video, per Songfacts, the band plays in a white setting with seated naked men, shot in the same session as "Waking Up".

It reached 17 in the UK, 9 in Canada, 53 on the Hot 100 and 2 on US modern rock. Pitchfork's 2022 list of the 250 best songs of the 1990s called it one of the marvels of Britpop. Setlist.fm counts 96 performances, though one summary has "Stutter" at the same count. It was the theme of Trigger Happy TV and was used in Captain Marvel (2019). Dave Grohl performed a Britpop-style cover, reported by Louder on December 16, 2020. We could not tell which version our upload is.