16. Elastica, Vaseline (1995)

My friend Oliver (hello, son) is obsessed with The Chain, the song-linking segment on Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie's weekday evening show on Radio 2. Its rules are simple. Pluck any song out of the air – let's say, for the sake of argument, the song below, The Jets' Crush On You. Someone might think, oh, the Jets were a gang in West Side Story, a film that starred two actors who went onto act in Twin Peaks. So – let's make the next song in the chain the theme from that series, which was Falling by Julee Cruise.

A confession: Oliver, my boyfriend, two other friends and I now play this game by e-mail. The Jets, yes, was my entry, the Julee Cruise song, my boyfriend's follow-up.

Anyway, today we got to Molly's Lips by The Vaselines, which brought me to my next, rather weak, link in the chain – in terms of how inventive one can be with the links, I mean. But I had to include this song because, goddamit, it is the lost classic of Britpop – a dirty slip of a thing which, like so many of Elastica's songs, is basically about shagging.

This song also has a legend that lives on among people of a certain age. In essence, Vaseline was very, very short, which made it a perfect track for the end of a C90 mix-tape. Oliver told us today that he had once put this song on the end of one side of a tape, nine times, for a laugh. I'm sure Justine Frischmann, and anyone out there born in the late 1970s, would be very happy to hear that.