Better than their album Sulk, the Associates’ greatest single is both a relic and a ruse; a synth pomp-stomper, whose bracing melody and self-conscious treatment of (weary, paranoid) excess renders it timeless. Framed by a wobbly, schizophrenic dialogue, and by music that chimes with pearled doom, Billy MacKenzie’s ‘aesthete-rotter’ vocal points up the song’s ambivalence toward lavish discord: Engulfed by its own rebounded echo, this is the sound of an atrophied lion in the trophy room — “Awake me!”