“It pre-sold gold before it even hit the stores,” Simon Day tells Apple Music. “It was crazy for kids that were just playing the alternative art-school scene for years before that.” Following Ratcat’s 1990 EP Tingles, the indie-pop band’s second full-length, 1991’s Blind Love, topped the ARIA charts in a matter of weeks. It catapulted the relatively underground Sydney group directly into the mainstream, along with immediate international attention, hordes of young Australian fans and more opportunities to tour and promote than they could have imagined. “It was a very exciting time,” recalls the vocalist, songwriter and guitarist. “It was a very different world. It had a life of its own, we were just kind of going with it.” Still, though the album seemingly delivered overnight success, there’d been four long years of grinding it out in clubs. “We were playing a lot around the local pubs in Sydney, and we'd travelled to Melbourne a few times, Perth,” he says, “and each time there was more media attention, more talking about yourself, more people interested. We were playing just to art school students, it was very alternative. To cross into the mainstream was crazy.” The album itself is a fun, frantic, catchy, punk-infused snapshot of the Australian music scene during the early ’90s. “A lot of the songs are homages to classic rock ’n’ roll—loving the rebel, going out and having fun with your friends. Lovemaking and fighting with your beloved partner, someone driving fast—all those kinds of things were fun and uptempo. We used to have a dance test in the studio: If you could dance to it, we were doing it.” Below, Day talks through each song on Ratcat’s Blind Love. Yes I Wanna Go “It’s just our homage to rock ’n’ roll, and having a good time and going out and dancing, really. There's a spirit in a lot of these. Our drummer [Andrew Polin] loved The Beach Boys around the time. We were listening to early-'60s surf music, so there's bits and pieces of that influence, even though it's really just a piece of fluff in a lot of ways.” Run & Hide “It’s just relationship stuff, you know, the reality of the fact that there are good times and bad times, laughter and fights. Does it have any relevance to any particular person? I don't think so. It's just a proclamation: ‘Things are okay, no matter what happens.’” Baby Baby “It’s a classic lost-love tale, really. The guy lost his girl and doesn't know what to do. Again, we loved all the '60s boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl kind of pop sensibility at the time. The number before this was all comic and strange, and this one still has elements of that, but it’s just about life. It wasn’t about a particular person, either—a lot of songs may be inspired by the way I was feeling, it was more about capturing the emotion. So some parts of it may be inspired by a few relationships I've had, but it’s more about how to put that in words so that other people feel it. I think I was happy at the time. I think it was more a reflection on the past.” Hopeless Mind “We loved all shoegaze at the time as well. We got to play with Ride at the Slough Festival, and later in '91, just after this record was released. There were a lot of gigs in a lot of places, which was good, we loved all that stuff. At the end of that album there’s even that Manchester beat and the shimmy-shimmy 12-string guitars going. It’s totally reflective of the time, really.” Pieces “Now, this was written by Amr [Zaid, bassist], and it's more about the problems in relationships. It falls into the whole kind of ‘How do you work things out in life?’ place. It’s hard for me to comment 100 percent on what it means, but it's a rock-y number. It's got all the elements. I think it passes the dance test.” Racing “It’s kinda like ‘Yes I Wanna Go’ in that it’s really just about having fun. Some of these songs are deeper than others, I should say, to me, but they all have the spirit.” That Ain't Bad “Everyone loves a rebel; it's about rebellion. I think, originally, I wanted to write a song about a rebel with the starting chords of D, A, G. Anyway, it came out in 10 minutes and it was one of those songs. There it was. I do remember playing it to the band, we hadn’t started recording. It was one of those ones that just fell in your lap. It came out really easily and felt really good.” The Wonder of You “It’s another along the lines of ‘Run & Hide’, the two sides of relationships. That's a little innuendo here. There are in some of these songs—it’s rock ’n’ roll and you have to have that, if you can get away with it.” Don't Go Now “It’s just really just about unconditional love. Robyn St. Clare was in The Hummingbirds—she had some chords and I wrote these lyrics and did it with Ratcat. She did a version called ‘Don't Slow Down’ in Love Positions.” Strange “It was really about what we were going through at the time. In those days, you could write a song and record it at a 16-track tape studio for 30 bucks an hour or whatever, and you could have that out as a piece of vinyl in the record stores within six weeks. So you had far more ability to comment on what was going on in your life socially. A lot of songs might have the context of relationship with the band, the record company, or how you're feeling about your audience.” The End “For some reason, I always loved to put a slow, soft song at the end of a vinyl record on the last side of the B-side, hence ‘The End’. It lowers you out. Again, it’s looking at the world, looking at life, trying to find a remedy for the ills. That's what that's about. That was just the point.”