The Boys Light Up is the debut album from Australian pub rock band Australian Crawl which was released in 1980 and contains the title track, “The Boys Light Up”.

The album reached #4 on the Australian album charts and remained in the charts for an unbroken 101 weeks, eventually selling over 280 000 copies (five times platinum).

The single was almost banned from radio play and some TV shows due to its explicit lyrics. Reyne makes observations about cocktail parties that his parents attended, including where one of his teachers was caught in the garden with someone else’s wife. Many listeners believe the chorus lyrics are about smoking marijuana but Reyne has stated that it was about smoking tobacco cigarettes when he was in Form Four at The Peninsula School.

In an interview with Peter Thompson on the ABC Television program Talking Heads, broadcast on 31 May 2010, Reyne answered a question on what the song was about, “Well, really? It’s about fellatio, but[…] it was also about the sort of burgeoning, you know, kind of… new middle class, the new money and the new money aspirational… uh… class.”

The title track was written by James Reyne. It contains the invented word “dorseted”:

“People aren’t used to hearing ‘dorseted’, and it’s not actually a word – it’s from the Dorset Gardens – I’m trying to be as suburban as possible, and it rhymed with ‘corseted’.” – James Reyne, 2003