There aren’t many pop songs which deal with the subject of domestic violence, but this one does. I heard Vega on the radio many years after it was a hit saying she took the name from that of the boy who did indeed live on the floor above her. She subsequently found he was playing on the fact that it had been used in the song as a chat-up line!
The first video below is the official one, the second a “live” performance.
This song had a triple life, first released on a compilation album in 1984 then in 1987 as an a capella version on Suzanne Vega’s second album Solitude Standing (with an instrumental reprise as the album’s last track) but as a single managed to reach no 58 in the UK, and finally as a remix by DNA in 1988 when it climbed to the dizzy heights of no 2.
Even though this wasn’t a big hit in the UK (number 83 on first release in 1985 and number 21 on re-release later the same year) it still made enough of an impression to inspire me to name a character after it in my story The Gentlemen Go By (published in Spectrum SF 2, 2000) though I never actually mentioned the song’s title in the text, leaving it to the reader to infer the connection.
