Luka

“I REMEMBER there was a woman who had travelled nine hours from Hong Kong to come to a show one night,” says Suzanne Vega. “When someone tells you that, you know why they’re there. They don’t have to say it, it’s in their eyes. It’s because of ‘Luka’.”

The 1980s had no shortage of big-issue songs, but nobody in the charts was tackling child abuse in oblique, non-demonstrative rhyming couplets. No-one except Suzanne Vega. A folk-minded New York singer-songwriter, Vega had arrived in 1985 with a debut album featuring the minor hit “Marlene On The Wall”. It was “Luka”, however, from her second album, Solitude Standing, that elevated her to star status in the summer of 1987.

A “dramatic monologue” conflating the stand-offish demeanour of a boy who lived in her NYC apartment block with an imagined victim of domestic abuse, “Luka” appeared fully formed one late summer Sunday in 1984, almost a year before Vega released her debut album. Though audiences in the Greenwich Village clubs she frequented initially found the song “embarrassing”, from the beginning her manager earmarked it as a potential hit single.

Almost three years of intense groundwork followed, as an evolving cast of producers and musicians worked to sculpt the song into something commercial without sacrificing its intimacy. The end result was strangely