In an interview Robyn revealed the real-life person who inspired this song wore a pair of horizontally elongated glasses (spectacles), which inspired the title. In January 2025 he shared more on his Patreon:
Years ago, in a foreign land, I met a green-eyed girl with alabaster skin and auburn hair. She was tall and cool and young. I wasn’t very old then, but I was older than she was. She was standing by a payphone as I was just alighting from a bus.
“It’s for you”, she said, and handed the receiver to me. She laughed. There was nobody on the line, but I was hooked.
She and I seemed to be magnetised by each other, and in no time at all were in each other’s arms. This was wonderful as long as we were only in each other’s arms occasionally; but as soon as we spent any time together we began to chafe against each other. My skin grated on hers like sandpaper.
Before long what we had most in common was the desire to get away from each other. I think of the pair of us now as two passengers on a stricken airliner, spiraling towards a mountainside; each of us jumping out of that plane thinking the other was the parachute, but neither of us billowing open. I believe I hit the ground before she did.
We both got up from our encounter, bruised and dazed, then walked away in opposite directions. We never saw each other again (although I sometimes think I glimpsed her years later in a record store in 2002). When we parted I was sore, in my head and my heart; but then, after a year or two had passed I began to think of her quite fondly. After all, hadn’t she triggered some of my best songs - and wasn’t that what I had wanted, really - more than security or a relationship?
I can still picture her slender frame, mantis-like, arching over to extinguish a tall black candle, and I can smell the waxy smoke curl past my wasted nostrils. I can relive her Victorian drapes opening in the thankful grey dawn, and the long ships in the harbour outside with their crew of abandoned sailors, following the same routes as their phantom ancestors. I see their ragged black sails in silhouette, and the golden throne on which I made her queen, for a week or two.
The truth is, you can’t live day to day in a relationship founded on that kind of mythology. My bad for imposing it on us, perhaps - but we wouldn’t have lasted anyway, for much longer than we did.
The odd thing is that I’d come up with the chorus of this song a few weeks before she and I got together. That chorus must have been waiting for the verses to happen in real time, if there is such a thing. I hitched the whole thing together one chilly May afternoon, back in London in 1988, and recorded it for my next album.
The green-eyed girl [is] still alive, I’ve heard, older now but nowhere like as old as I am. I wish her well, and all the good things in life. And, yes: she did have one long pair of eyes.