The Girl on the Bicycle

There’s a video for Rollerblades where Eliza Doolittle rides a bicycle through sunny streets, and the disconnect is too deliberate to be accidental. The song isn’t really about rollerblades anyway—or it is, technically, in the way pop songs about specific objects are always about something else entirely—and the bicycle ends up making exactly as much sense as anything.

She was enormous in Britain in those years and practically invisible everywhere else, which I’ve never fully understood. Twenty-four years old, relentlessly cheerful, with tan legs in cut-off shorts and a voice that managed to sound both retro and fresh—warm, a little Caribbean-inflected, genuinely at ease with itself. The kind of artist who makes you want to lie in a park in late May and stop thinking about anything at all. That sounds dismissive and isn’t: most people trying for that feeling miss it by miles.

The UK pop landscape then was crowded with people performing effortlessness. She just had it.