Sandi Thom – ‘I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)’

8 June 2006

Paraphrasing only slightly, I remember the general mood about ‘I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)’ on the Internet message boards of summer 2006 being along the lines of KILL! SCREECH! BURN! HATE! I was living off foreign at the time, in a country where the song barely nudged into the top ten and wasn’t on every radio hourly, so I was observing this from a remove; I had no strong feelings on the matter. Today, though, this is the sort of magic pop-culture curio I love. Just as kicking James Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’ was the people’s game a year earlier, lambasting Sandi Thom and her hit single was de rigueur for any music-minded opinion-haver. Why was this, and was it justified?

The song itself is a cross between Janis Joplin singing “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” and an English Brexiteer posting that tired old meme of all the things they “could do” in their mythical youth. Its lyrical faults are pitifully front and centre. Unlikely title persona aside, rose-tinted ’77 and ’69 were both conspicuously a year too late for when “revolution was in the air” – like rocking up to the GPO at Easter 1917. Thom’s litany of pleasures past is the craven small-c conservative worldview you’d expect from a middle-aged male rocker or radio jock, not an actual young person. If there’s a sense of humour at work in this song, and I take my lead from Thom’s album being called the dreadful passive-aggressive t-shirt slogan Smile… It Confuses People, then it’s at homeopathic levels of undetectability. Thom herself, though, comes across as a likeable performer with a voice easy on the ear, and a better lyrical slant would have you instinctively hum along to that happy-go-lucky tune and sparse folky arrangement. So, you could allow this was just a whimsical song, from a singer who hit on a catchy chorus hook and fleshed it out, that was never meant for the scrutiny which comes with being number one in the charts.

The target on Thom’s forehead came with her backstory as a plucky unknown who built a fanbase by webcasting gigs from her basement, in the MySpace days of early 2006 when you would probably have needed magnanimous music-industry marketing to deliver much of that. “Astroturfing!” said the vox populi. Today, of course, Sandi Thom’s DIY streaming would be the norm, but it’s admittedly hard to see a pioneering tech early adopter in someone who sings nostalgically about a time when you had to get up to change the channel on your TV.

What’s really going on with Sandi Thom and ‘I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)’, and with James Blunt before that, is a record company impeccably reading the ’00s public taste for performative authenticity, be it sensitive shush-magnets like Damien Rice, the novelty naivete of Nizlopi, the landfill indie of all Britrock, the resurgence of ‘Fairytale Of New York’ (which started reappearing in the Christmas Irish top ten in 2005) or the hipster notions of Radiohead, all for that toasty self-righteous feeling when you stick it to the pantomime villainy of Simon Cowell’s X Factory. We could have had glam-funk aliens, disco-tronic divas, and wall-to-wall Xenomania bangers, but no. You wanted performative authenticity—a punk rocker with flowers in their hair—so that’s what you got. It’s you!