Once everyone else had gone home and I was alone in the otherwise darkened building, with just the hum and chatter of the computer terminal and the far-off light of a coffee machine next to the stairwell where murderers lurked, I wrote '(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea'.

[2]Lyrically, the song was influenced partially by "a late run of '60s films set in London on the BBC" that Costello had been watching at the time.

[2] The song was recorded quickly; bassist Bruce Thomas recalled, "We literally did the best tracks on [This Year's Model]—"Pump It Up", "Chelsea"—in one afternoon.

[4] "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" was based on what Costello described as a "stop-start chord sequence borrowed from the Who" combined with a "clickerty-clackerty guitar figure off an old Rocksteady record by the Pioneers".

[8] Costello later claimed that Thomas had lifted the drum intro from Mitch Mitchell's performance on the Jimi Hendrix Experience's song "Fire".

[5] Organist Steve Nieve uses a deliberately out of tune Vox Continental organ on the song; Costello described the keyboard sound as "thin" and "evil".

[9] Costello cited the song as an example of This Year's Model's "spiky and sour" sound, which was created through "a solitary box of tricks to delay and detune" the instruments.

The song received glowing critical attention at the time, with the NME concluding, "The single's so good, the very act of releasing it amounts to bragging on a colossal scale".

AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine praised the song for being "underscored with sexual menace", while the same site's Tom Maginnis called it a "brilliant ska-inflected rocker".

[1] The video shows the band performing in an unfurnished, light-drenched, wholly white set, and uses a simple shrinking square zoom effect.