If any song had the male half of the world at its feet it must have been Judie Tzuke and Mike Paxman’s 1979 torcher Stay With Me Till Dawn.

It had the street cred of being on Elton John’s Rocket Records label but more importantly it was sung by the sultry and sexy (and blonde) Tzuke in the same “this one is just for you” manner that anyone who has ever been convinced that their favourite performer really is looking straight at them and only them during a concert.

Yes, alright “sultry,” “sexy” and “blonde” are terribly sexist and non pc in a day and age when we should all concentrate on the quality of the song and not the dateable and (further down the fantasy road) beddable quality of the singer – but in 1979 hearing and seeing Tzuke deliver:

“But I need you tonight
(Need you tonight)
Yes, I need you tonight
(Need you tonight)
And I’ll show you a sunset
If you’ll stay with me till dawn”
meant the world to any hot blooded, sickeningly shy and acne ridden teenage male.

With three appearances on Top of the Pops on 12 July, 26 July and 9 August 1979 to promote a song which peaked at number 16 and only actually stayed in the charts for 10 weeks something had obviously also been spotted by tv moguls.

Whilst the lyrics more than hint at something deeper than chatter (“Is this a game you’re playin’?
I don’t understand what’s goin’ on
I can’t see through your frown
First you’re up
Then you’re down
You’re keepin’ me from someone
I want to know”) Tzuke has insisted the song is about a good friend of hers with whom she often used to stay up till dawn chatting.
So how does that explain: “Is this a game you’re playin’?
Playin’ with my heart
(Need you tonight)
Ooh, stop playin’ with my heart
(Need you tonight)
And I’ll show you a sunset
If you’ll stay with me till dawn.”
Still, if she says it’s just a friendly chat it would be rude to argue.

Judie Tzuke didn’t materialize from nowhere. She was born Judie Myers on 3 April 1956. Her family had relocated from Poland to England in the 1920s, and changed their surname from Tzuke to Myers. Her mother, Jean Silverside, was a television actress who appeared in The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, The Marty Feldman Show and The Goodies, and her father, Sefton Myers, was a successful property developer who also managed artists and singers — most notably Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice during the writing of Jesus Christ Superstar.

When she embarked on her singing career, she decided to reclaim the family’s Jewish-Polish name as her stage name. Educated in the visual and performing arts (and music), she performed in folk clubs from the age of 15. Her meeting with Mike Paxman in 1975 was a turning point and they began to collaborate. Under the name Tzuke & Paxo, they eventually secured a recording contract and the duo released a single, These Are the Laws produced by Tony Visconti for his Good Earth label.

Her solo career began in 1977, when she signed to Elton John’s label after meeting David Croker from Rocket and playing him a few songs including Stay With Me Till Dawn. The pair proceeded to spend around six months or so recording her début album at Air Studios in London and Stay With Me Till Dawn’s John Punter-produced parent album Welcome to the Cruise.
Her first single on the Rocket label, For You, was released in 1978 – and bombed.

In fact her only notable singles success was Stay With Me Till Dawn in 1979. The song became a Top 20 hit in the UK in the summer and a Top 10 hit in Australia and was featured on Tzuke’s 1979 debut album, Welcome to the Cruise, which was also a Top 20 hit.
In 2002, the song was ranked 39 in a Radio 2 poll of the 50 Best British Songs 1952–2002. It was also sampled by Scottish dance musician Mylo in the song Need You Tonite on his 2004 album Destroy Rock & Roll.

On the US Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, the single peaked at 47, spending 6 weeks on the chart. It also peaked at number one on the Bubbling Under the Hot 100 chart. After Stay With Me her four subsequent UK releases failed to peak higher than number 92 on the UK Singles Chart, rendering her a one-hit wonder.

Judie’s daughter, Bailey Tzuke is a British singer/songwriter whose vocals were featured on the Freemasons cover of the Alanis Morissette track Uninvited, which reached number 8 in the UK charts in 2007.

Plans for the 40th anniversary of Welcome To the Cruise and planned tour have been postponed until early 2020. Tzuke has begun working in 2019 on a new album with the working title of The Wolf Moon Sessions.

You would think that having somewhere in the region of 150 fellow artistes record their version of one of your songs would give you a fighting chance of fame ever after.

You would think that impressing Elton John enough for him to have you join him on his version of that song – Love Song – would mean more people would remember you even nine years after your death aged 66 from cerebrovascular disease following an extended illness.

But fame is fickle and it doesn’t help your chances when you suffer from crippling stage fright.

Lesley Duncan (married name Lesley Cox; 12 August 1943 – 12 March 2010) is best known for her work during the 1970s. She received plenty of airplay on BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2 but never achieved great commercial success, in part because of her unwillingness to chase stardom and also that crippling stage fright.

She was born in Stockton-on-Tees and left school while only 14 years old. At 19, while working in a London coffee bar, she and her brother Jimmy (soon to become manager of the Pretty Things) took some songs to a leading Tin Pan Alley music publisher. Jimmy was signed with a weekly retainer of £10, and Lesley with £7, on the grounds that she had fewer songs, no guitar and was a girl. Within a year, she had an EMI recording contract and had appeared in the film What a Crazy World (1963), with Joe Brown, Marty Wilde and Susan Maughan.

Her early recordings were predictably pop (and equally predictably flops – eg I Want A Steady Guy (as Lesley Duncan and the Jokers, You Kissed Me Boy, Just for the Boy and Hey Boy (notice a theme here?).

But in addition to writing and singing her own material, Duncan was in wide demand as a session singer in the mid to late 1960s, most notably working with Dusty Springfield from 1964 to 1972, a favour Springfield returned by performing backing vocals for several Duncan recordings.

She can be seen on many of the performances featured in the BBC DVD Dusty at the BBC.
B

y the late 60s, Lesley’s songwriting was changing in style from girl-pop to more reflective writing – perfect for her distinctive voice. Her first album, Sing Children Sing (1971), was produced by Jimmy Horowitz, whom Lesley married in 1970 (they later divorced). It was followed by Earth Mother (1972); the title track, dedicated to Friends of the Earth, is one of the first, and finest, eco-songs.
She had one of the most under-rated voices in pop/rock history and Love Song remains one of the loveliest songs never to make a mark for its writer.

Small wonder it impressed Elton John so much he covered it for his Tumbleweed Connection album with her singing harmony.
John described Love Song as “one of the very few” songs he did not co-author but included on an album. Listen to the lyrics (and to some degree the melody) and it doesn’t take long to spot the similarity to his own Your Song:

“The words I have to say
May well be simple but they’re true
Until you give your love
There’s nothing more that we can do

Love is the opening door
Love is what we came here for
No-one could offer you more
Do you know what I mean?”

Duncan again joined Elton John at his request to provide vocals for his 1971 album Madman Across the Water, and in exchange John played piano on her first solo album Sing Children Sing. She also co-wrote three songs with Scott Walker for The Walker Brothers in addition to providing backing vocals for them. She can also be heard on the studio recording of Jesus Christ Superstar.
She appeared onstage with John in a 1974 concert at the Royal Festival Hall to perform the duet once again, and the live recording of Love Song was included on John’s Here and There album.

Love Song went on to be covered by more than 150 other artists including Olivia Newton-John, David Bowie and Barry White. In 1977, Topol and Najah Salam recorded it in Hebrew and Arabic to commemorate the peace meeting between Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, and Israel’s, Menachem Begin.

Duncan famously contributed backing vocals to one of the top selling albums of all time, Pink Floyd’s 1973 release The Dark Side of the Moon, which was engineered by Alan Parsons. Later, in 1979, she again worked with Parsons, singing lead vocals on the song If I Could Change Your Mind for the Alan Parsons Project album Eve, in her final album appearance

This success notwithstanding, and despite her own albums receiving critical acclaim, Duncan’s multiple solo efforts failed to achieve commercial success and led to her retiring from the business.

She moved to Cornwall and, in 1978, married her second husband, the record producer Tony Cox; they later moved to Oxfordshire and, in 1996, to Mull, in the Inner Hebrides. She contributed both her time and her music to causes she believed in, including releasing a new version of her song Sing Children Sing for the Year of the Child in 1978.

Most of her Mull neighbours came to know her as a cheerful gardener and knew nothing of her previous life in the music industry.

As a nation we’ve always had a soft spot for a novelty song. Who could resist the cheeky lyrics of George Formby’s Little Stick of Blackpool Rock (and pretty much everything else he strummed his uke to)?

Arthur Askey didn’t do too badly with his little tea pot and his buzzy bees either. And later who could forget (try though we did) Benny Hill’s 1971 chart topping Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In the West) which at least was much better than 1961’s forgettable Gather In the Mushrooms.

We’ve also tended to be rather fond of the underdog and the one hit wonder so it’s hardly surprising that in the punkish year of 1978 Jilted John should win the nation’s heart with his eponymous anthem to doomed nerds ticking every box.

As with the 1950s, nobody worth their salt sang under their real name – then it was the era of Tommy Steel and Billy Fury. By the late 70s it was Jonny Rotten and Sid Vicious playing havoc with filling in tax declarations.

Jilted John was, in fact, Sheffield-born Graham David Fellows, a drama student at Manchester Polytechnic who after his initial success as the embittered teenager whose girlfriend Julie had left him for another man named Gordon, later morphed into the equally comic (and much longer lasting) character John Shuttleworth.

As a sidebar Fellows appeared in Coronation Street as Les Charlton, a young biker chasing the affections of married Gail Platt (then Tilsley). During his fame as Jilted John, Fellows had first appeared on Coronation Street in a very brief cameo role in which he meets Gail, single at the time, on the street in Manchester.

In 2007 he appeared in an episode of ITV’s Heartbeat.

But who couldn’t feel sorry for John (the jilted one) when he opens his ode with:
“I’ve been going out with a girl
Her name is Julie
But last night she said to me
When we were watching telly

(This is what she said)

She said listen John, I love you
But there’s this bloke, I fancy
I don’t want to two time you
So it’s the end for you and me.”
The song is presented almost as a monologue and has all the matter of factness of Squeeze or The Kinks at their best. But a little more pointed:
“Who’s this bloke I asked her
Goooooordon, she replied
Not THAT puff, I said dismayed
Yes but he’s no puff she cried
(He’s more of a man than you’ll ever be)”

Then there’s the real punk/oi moment of “Here we go, two three four” and one of the most telling lines in pop history:
“I was so upset that I cried
All the way to the chip shop.”

No wonder John is upset. He’s been dumped “just ’cause he’s better lookin’ than me, just ’cause he’s cool and trendy.”

And then comes the punchline which has haunted anyone who shares the forename ever since, the oft repeated refrain “Gordon is a moron.”
There were other punk novelty moments (or maybe punk was just one big comedy moment?) – such as Banana Splits (Tra-La-La) and Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps, Please but none caught the fusion of teen angst, rejection, helplessness and confrontation, in the same way.

As with so many of music’s classics there was an element of right time right place luck about it all.

Fellows later said: “I’d written a couple of songs and I wanted to record them. So I went into a local record shop and asked if they knew any indie or punk labels. They said there were two, Stiff in London and Rabid just down the road. So I phoned Rabid up, and they told me to send in a demo. We did the demos with the late Colin Goddard – of Walter & the Softies – on guitar, and the drummer and bass player of The Smirks. I took it along to Rabid, who loved it … so we re-recorded it a few days later with John Scott playing guitar and bass and Martin Zero (aka Martin Hannett) producing.”

The single, released by Rabid in April 1978 actually featured Going Steady as the A-side and Jilted John as the B-side. Jilted John was first played on national radio by BBC Radio One’s John Peel who apparently commented that if it was promoted by a major record label he could see it becoming a huge hit. It was subsequenty picked up by EMI and introduced by Kid Jensen on Top of the Pops as “one of the most bizarre singles of the decade”. It reached number 4.

Two follow-up singles were released the same year.A pseudo concept-album also produced by Hannett followed, entitled True Love Stories, charting John’s love-life – and two further singles, neither of which was a hit. No other recordings followed these, making Jilted John a classic one-hit wonder. Strangely a cash-in single by Julie and Gordon sold moderately well, as did lapel badges bearing the legends “Gordon is a moron” and “Gordon is not a moron”.

Fellows revived the Jilted John character at the 2008 Big Chill festival premiering a new song about Keira Knightley’s ultra-thin figure. In December 2014 Jilted John won the One Hit Wonder World Cup feature on the BBC Radio 6 Music Steve Lamacq show. In late 2015 it was announced that Fellows would once again revive Jilted John for Rebellion Festival 2016 at the Winter Gardens in, Blackpool.

In 1986 Fellows created John Shuttleworth, a middle-aged, aspiring singer-songwriter from Sheffield with a quiet manner, slightly nerdish tendencies a Yamaha PSS680 portable keyboard, and a repertoire including such songs as Pigeons in Flight – which

Shuttleworth attempted to have selected for the Eurovision Song Contest. A spoof documentary about it, called Europigeon, featured such past Eurovision stars as Clodagh Rodgers, Lynsey de Paul, Bruce Welch, Katrina Leskanich (from Katrina and the Waves), Johnny Logan, Cheryl Baker and Brotherhood of Man.

He has released a number of albums and singles as John Shuttleworth

Fellows only played a handful of gigs as his Jilted John alter-ego: “I think we only did about six or seven… all in Manchester. Although to be totally honest, I only really did those to get an Equity card!”

By all accounts they were shambolic if fairly amusing — affairs.

Maybe a final word should be left to rock journalist Paul Morley who penned a typically OTT piece in the NME on the Manchester scene, homing in on Rabid and Jilted John in particular:

“This is an everyday, ordinary tale of everyday adolescent infatuation, and yet it is conceived and performed definitively: a Pop drama, no less. Ultimately, absurdly, there is too much intense accessibility for it to be a commercial success, even if it had the backing of a major label.”

Thankfully he was as wrong as he was wordy!

However, by the time his follow-up single was out, Fellows was back at drama college, his Jilted John persona already behind him. Consequently, with no artiste available to promote them, both the excellent debut album and the single stiffed (the LP ended up selling around 15,000 units).

Later Fellows admitted: “There was a big inspiration and that was John Otway. He had this hit called Really Free in 1977 and I just loved that kind of spoken delivery and the way he half sings during the chorus. There was an everyday quality to the lyrics, it was just throwaway and had a quirkiness that I wanted to copy. I’d always thought there were so many love songs that spoke in generalities, ’If you leave me it will break my heart,’ ‘I can’t go on without you,’ all that shit that I never believed. I like songs with detail. I was also aware of Squeeze and the lyrics of Chris Difford who shares a love of the minutia and detail and rhyme.

“There wasn’t a real Gordon but it was one of those trendy names, like Gary or Colin. They were working class names but were guys with cool hairdos and leather jackets and the shirts with the big collars. And ‘Gordon’ happens to almost rhyme with ‘Moron.’ But my childhood sweetheart was a girl called Julie, so that’s that.”

Here’s a pop quiz chicken and egg question. Well two actually.
Part one. Whose version of the classic power pop song Hearts In Her Eyes was released first? Was it The Records – whose members Will Birch and John Wicks wrote it – or The Searchers who, with their harmonies and jingle jangle guitar sound, it was clearly written for?
Part two. Which of those two bands had the bigger hit with it?

Well, first out of the traps with the song were The Searchers, one the first wave of Merseybeat bands in the early 60s. Founded as a skiffle group in Liverpool in 1959 by John McNally and Mike Pender, the band took their name from the 1956 John Ford western film The Searchers. and with a penchant for dusting down American songs such as The Drifters’ 1961 hit Sweets For My Sweet, remakes of Jackie De Shannon’s Needles and Pins and When You Walk in the Room, a cover of The Orlons’ Don’t Throw Your Love Away, and a revival of The Clovers’ Love Potion No. 9, they had kept slogging away (and still do!) playing both the expected old hits as well as contemporary songs including Neil Young’s Southern Man.

They were rewarded for their efforts in 1979 when the street cred Sire Records signed them to a multi-record deal. Two albums were released: The Searchers and Play for Today. Both records garnered critical acclaim and featured some original tracks, as well as covers of songs including Alex Chilton’s cult classic September Gurls and John Fogerty’s Almost Saturday Night. But with scant promotion and little if any radio airplay, they did not break into the charts

The albums did, however, revive the group’s career, because concerts from then on alternated classic hits with the newer songs and were well received. Sire released Hearts In Her Eyes, which successfully updated the band’s distinctive 12-string guitars/vocal harmonies sound, and picked up some radio airplay. With more promotion it might even have charted.

According to frontman John McNally, the band was ready to head into the studio to record a third album for Sire when they were informed that, due to label reorganisation, their contract had been dropped.

Likewise The Records version of their own song released later didn’t chart either, making it possibly the most commercial tune ever to have not charted with either of two excellent versions.

Perhaps it sounded too American? Lyrically it certainly borrowed a line or two from across the Atlantic and its bouncy style owed more to the sunshine of America’s West Coast than Britain’s South Coast.

The Records had emerged out of the ashes of the Kursaal Flyers, a pub rock group featuring drummer Will Birch formed in Southend-on-Sea in 1973. They are most famous for their 1976 top 20 single Little Does She Know and were the subject of a BBC documentary following them on tour in 1975.

In 1977, John Wicks joined the band as a rhythm guitarist, and he and Birch quickly started writing songs together, Wicks as composer, Birch as lyricist. The Kursaal Flyers dissolved three months after Wicks joined, but he and Birch continued to write songs together with the hopes of starting a new four-piece group with Birch on drums and Wicks on lead vocals and rhythm guitar. Birch soon came up with a name for the formative band: The Records. The new group was heavily influenced both by bands like The Beatles and The Kinks as well as early power pop groups such as Badfinger, Big Star, and The Raspberries. At the time power pop was experiencing a renaissance on both sides of the Atlantic.

Hence getting away with the lotta/gonna lyrics:
“Some girls have a whole lotta
Trouble finding one boy
Others want a lover and some
They just want a fun boy
My girl, she’s smart
She’s never ever
Gonna give give her heart
And she’s wise

She’s got hearts in her eyes
She’s got hearts in her eyes
Like a kid in a toy shop
She can’t stop
She wants all the boys
She’s got hearts in her eyes

Some girls want a boy
To give ’em all the action
Others in a hurry
To find a little satisfaction
This girl, she’s tough
She gets going
When the going gets rough
And she cries

She’s got hearts in her eyes
She’s got hearts in her eyes
Like a kid in a toy shop
She can’t stop
She wants all the boys
She’s got hearts in her eyes

When she’s at a party
She will flit from boy to boy
And she’ll never settle
Til her heart is filled with joy
My girl, she’s smart
She’s never ever
Gonna give her heart
And she’s wise

She’s got hearts in her eyes
She’s got hearts in her eyes
Like a kid in a toy shop
She can’t stop
She wants all the boys
She’s got
She’s got hearts in her eyes
She’s got hearts in her eyes
Like a kid in a toy shop
She can’t stop
She wants all the boys
She’s got hearts in her eyes.”

Despite the catchiness of Hearts In Her Eyes, The Records are best remembered for the minor hit single (it got nowhere in the UK but made the mid 50s in the USA) and cult favourite Starry Eyes which Allmusic called “a near-perfect song that defined British power pop in the ’70s.” But had they heard Hearts?

The Records were hired to back Stiff Records singer Rachel Sweet on the Be Stiff Tour ’78 opening the shows with a set of their own. Birch and Wicks also wrote a song for Sweet’s debut album entitled Pin a Medal On Mary.

Their own debut album peaked on the Billboard American chart at 41. That was the pinnacle of their success.
Birch reverted to tour managing, running Rock Tours, a sightseeing London Bus venture, producing and writing. Wicks relocated to the USA in 1994 and was writing, recording and performing both solo and with a new incarnation of the band up until 2018. He died on October 7, 2018 in Burbank, California.

Hearts In Her Eyes has yet to chart.

Pretty much everyone would like a love song (or any song) written to or about them. Even Warren Beattie and Mick Jagger didn’t mind too much standing in line to take the credits on Carly Simon’s pointed You’re So Vain.

But most of us have to make do with someone else doing all the hard work for us – so surely the next best thing is to make a song sound like it could have been written by anyone and likewise could be written about anyone.
One step forward then for Elton John and long time collaborator Bernie Taupin’s timeless love ballad Your Song. The title says it all. It’s your song. Nobody else’s.

It’s stood the test of time as one of the best ever love songs – not to mention being used twice as the soundtrack to the John Lewis Christmas tv campaign (2010 by Ellie Goulding and 2018 by Sir Elton himself).

On closer examination though it’s also one of the most lyrically banal odes to romance ever to grace the charts (and there have been some lulus).

Bernie Taupin seems to agree and is quoted as saying: “The early ones {songs} were not drawn from experience but imagination. Your Song could only have been written by a 17-year-old who’d never been laid in his life.”

Sir Elton has mixed feelings. In a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, he elaborated: “What can I say, it’s a perfect song. It gets better every time I sing it. I remember writing it at my parents’ apartment in North London, and Bernie giving me the lyrics, sitting down at the piano and looking at it and going, ‘Oh, my God, this is such a great lyric, I can’t fuck this one up.’ It came out in about 20 minutes, and when I was done, I called him in and we both knew. I was 22, and he was 19, and it gave us so much confidence. Empty Sky was lovely, but it was very naive. We went on to do more esoteric stuff like Take Me to the Pilot, of course, but musically, this was a big step forward. And the older I get, the more I sing these lyrics, and the more they resonate with me.”
All well and good but the song starts out like an ode to indigestion: “It’s a little bit funny this feeling inside” before desperately explaining “I’m not one of those who can easily hide,

I don’t have much money but boy if I did
I’d buy a big house where we both could live.
If I was a sculptor but then again no
Or a man who makes potions in a traveling show
Oh I know it’s not much but it’s the best I can do.”
Given that potion selling was, even in the late 1960s and early 1970s a niche profession, it’s as well he gets round to admitting: “My gift is my song
And this one’s for you
And you can tell everybody this is your song
It may be quite simple but now that it’s done
I hope you don’t mind
I hope you don’t mind
That I put down in words
How wonderful life is while you’re in the world.”

That’s more like it. Simple yet sound. Get out now whilst the going is good. But no, he/they have more to say:
“I sat on the roof and kicked off the moss” {apparently Taupin wrote the song’s lyrics after having breakfast on the roof of 20 Denmark Street, where Elton worked for a music publishing firm as an office boy.} and then “Well a few of the verses, well they’ve got me quite cross

But the sun’s been quite kind
While I wrote this song.
It’s for people like you that
Keep it turned on “
Get out. Get out. Get out. Too late………:“So excuse me forgetting but these things I do
You see I’ve forgotten
If they’re green or they’re blue.” What??? Save yourself! You could be ruining your future career.
But just time they do: “Anyway the thing is what I really mean
Yours are the sweetest eyes I’ve ever seen
And you can tell everybody this is your song
It may be quite simple but
Now that it’s done
I hope you don’t mind
I hope you don’t mind
That I put down in words
How wonderful life is while you’re in the world
I hope you don’t mind
I hope you don’t mind
That I put down in words
How wonderful life is while you’re in the world.”

That’s more like it, “sweetest eyes”, always a winner. Cue untold numbers of suitors getting down on one knee with a ring in their hand and a song in their throat.

So who is the “your” in Your Song? Elton hadn’t come out of the closet yet, but Bernie Taupin knew it was already bursting at the seams, which is part of the reason why the lyrics avoid using gendered pronouns.
Elton has said that this song is not about anyone in particular, and Taupin has refused to reveal the identity of the person, if they even exist. He told Rolling Stone: “I always thought Your Song was written about one of his girlfriends, and when I asked him that, he just said, ‘No it wasn’t!’ He gets fairly defensive.”

He told Music Connection in 1989: “It’s like the perennial ballad Your Song, which has got to be one of the most naïve and childish lyrics in the entire repertoire of music, but I think the reason it still stands up is because it was real at the time.
“That was exactly what I was feeling. I was 17 years old and it was coming from someone whose outlook on love or experience with love was totally new and naïve.”

It originally appeared on Elton’s self-titled second studio album (which was released in 1970). The song was released in the United States in October 1970 as the B-side to Take Me to the Pilot. Both songs received airplay, but Your Song was preferred by disc jockeys and replaced Take Me to the Pilot as the A-side, eventually making it to number eight on the Billboard chart. The song also peaked at number seven in the UK, as well as charting in the top 10 in several other countries.

But Your Song was actually first released by American rock band Three Dog Night in March 1970 on their third studio album, It Ain’t Easy. Elton was an opening act for them for a while and they didn’t release it as a single as they wanted to let him, then an upcoming artist, have a go with it.

Like with most Elton songs, he wrote the melody while Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics. It was one of the first songs they wrote together. They met after a record company gave Elton some of Taupin’s lyrics to work with.
Eventually, they moved into Elton’s parents’ house, where they started working together. The original lyrics have coffee stains on them.

In 1998, Your Song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 2004 the song was placed at number 137 on Rolling Stone’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, as well as in its 2010 list.
The song has been covered by a number of artists, including Ellie Goulding, whose version reached number two in the UK in late 2010, and Lady Gaga. The song was also covered by Ewan McGregor in the movie musical Moulin Rouge! and by Taron Egerton for the 2019 Elton John biopic movie Rocketman.

Somebody somewhere is probably writing a university thesis about songs with days of the week in their title.
And if not, why not? There have been so many of them just listing them alone would be half way to a mortar board and a feature in one of the quality Sunday newspapers.

For the record (no pun intended) the most popular day by a nose whisker looks like Saturday with better known offerings including Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting (Elton John), Another Saturday Night (Sam Cooke), Saturday Night at the Movies (The Drifters), Get Down Saturday Night (Oliver Cheatham) and Saturday Nite (Earth Wind and Fire).
Sunday doesn’t do too badly with high spots including Everyday Is Like Sunday (Morrissey), Lazy Sunday (Small Faces), Pleasant Valley Sunday (The Monkees), Sunday Bloody Sunday (U2), Sunday Girl (Blondie) and Sunday Morning (Velvet Underground).
Tuesday is a bit quieter with Ruby Tuesday (Melanie and the Rolling Stones), Tuesday Morning (The Pogues), Love You Til Tuesday (David Bowie) and Everything’s Tuesday (Chairmen of the Board) flying the flag.

Wednesday is a bit boring with only Waiting for Wednesday (Lisa Loeb), Wednesday Week (The Undertones) and Wednesday Morning 3am (Simon and Garfunkel) worth remembering – and Thursday isn’t much better with Thursday’s Child (David Bowie and Eartha Kitt), Thursday (Country Joe & the Fish and Jim Croce) and Thursday Afternoon (Brian Eno’s 61 minutes opus).
So it’s TGI Friday then with Friday On My Mind (The Easybeats), It’s Friday I’m In Love (The Cure), Friday (Daniel Bedingfield),

Friday Street (Paul Weller), Friday’s Angels (Generation X) and Friday’s Child (Will Young).

Hang on a minute. What happened to Monday? Well there’s new and old Blue Monday (New Order and Fats Domino) the New Romantic New Moon On Monday (Duran Duran), the realistic Manic Monday (The Bangles), the meandering Monday Monday (Mamas and Papas) and, of course, I Don’t Like Mondays (The Boomtown Rats).

So that’s optimism, realism, doldrums and dreams all covered – not to mention…….. mindless murder.
Bearing in mind its inspiration, the July 1979 Boomtown Rats’ chart topper I Don’t Like Mondays would be lucky to get airplay these days.

On the Monday morning of January 29, 1979, 16 year-old Brenda Spencer opened fire on the elementary school across the street from her family home in San Diego, California. Using a .22 caliber rifle, she killed two adults and injured eight students as well as a police officer. Before giving herself up to the police, she spoke to a reporter on the phone regarding her motive: “I just started shooting, that’s it. I just did it for the fun of it. I just don’t like Mondays. I just did it because it’s a way to cheer the day up. Nobody likes Mondays.”

She showed no remorse for her crime but could probably sue for a share in the songwriting royalties of what came next.
Boomtown Rats writer and frontman (and erstwhile National Treasure – albeit a bonkers one) Bob Geldof said later about the song: “I was doing a radio interview in Atlanta with [keyboardist Johnnie] Fingers and there was a telex machine beside me. I read it as it came out. Not liking Mondays as a reason for doing somebody in is a bit strange. I was thinking about it on the way back to the hotel and I just said ‘silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload’. I wrote that down. And the journalists interviewing her said, ‘Tell me why?’ It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it. It wasn’t an attempt to exploit tragedy.”
Of course not.

But for a band that seemed to still be in search of a direction it was a godsend. They had previously flitted from punk to new wave, from pop to being Bruce Springsteen’s Irish cousins. This was the band’s sixth UK Top 20 hit and their second number one (Rat Trap was the first – and the first new wave number for anyone).

Lyrically it was a reasonably clever interpretation of the event starting out with:
“The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody’s gonna go to school today
She’s gonna make them stay at home
And daddy doesn’t understand it
He always said she was good as gold
And he can see no reasons
‘Cos there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be shown?”
And ending with:
“And all the playing’s stopped in the playground now
She wants to play with the toys a while
And school’s out early and soon we’ll be learning
And the lesson today is how to die
And then the bullhorn crackles
And the captain tackles
(With the problems of the how’s and why’s)
And he can see no reasons
‘Cos there are no reasons
What reason do you need to die, die?
Oh Oh Oh”

Plus variations on the memorable chorus/hook of:
“Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I wanna shoot
The whole day down, down, down, shoot it all down’“

It was released as the lead single from the band’s third album, The Fine Art of Surfacing and was a number one single in the UK Singles Chart for four weeks during the summer of 1979, emerging as the sixth biggest hit of the UK that year.
Geldof had been contacted by Steve Jobs to play a gig for Apple, inspiring the opening line about a “silicon chip”. The song was first performed less than a month after the shooting.

Geldof had originally intended it as a B-side, but changed his mind after it was successful with audiences on the Rats’ US tour. Spencer’s family tried unsuccessfully to prevent the single from being released in the United States.
In later years, Geldof admitted that he regretted writing it because he “made [Brenda Spencer] famous.”
Despite reaching number one in the UK, it only reached number 73 on the US Billboard Hot 100. The song was played regularly by album-oriented rock format radio stations in the United States throughout the 1980s, although radio stations in San Diego refrained from playing the track for some years in respect to local sensitivities about the shooting.

In the UK it won the Best Pop Song and Outstanding British Lyric categories at the Ivor Novello Awards.
On 9 September 1981, Geldof was joined on stage by fellow Boomtown Rat, Johnnie Fingers, to perform the song for The Secret Policeman’s Ball sponsored by Amnesty International. A recording of that performance appears on the 1982 album, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball.

The Boomtown Rats performed the song for Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in 1985. This was the band’s final major appearance. On singing the line, “And the lesson today is how to die”, Geldof paused for 20 seconds while the crowd applauded on the significance to those starving in Africa that Live Aid was intended to help.

I Don’t Like Mondays was subsequently covered by Tori Amos on her 2001 album Strange Little Girls and later by G4 on their 2006 album Act Three.

The original Boomtown Rats broke up in 1986, but re-formed in 2013, without founder members Johnnie Fingers or Gerry Cott.

Popular music has always asked questions. From The Honeycombs insecure Have I The Right? to the shared novelty honours of Patti Page and Lita Roza asking How Much Is That Doggie In The Window? From Van Morrison’s meaningful Have I Told You Lately? to Tony Christie’s now fairly meaningless (thanks to Peter Kay’s fund raising activities) Is This The Way To Amarillo?

But few have cut to the chase as abruptly and energetically as The Buzzcocks’ September 1978 hit Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t)?

The band had started their recording career in typical punk posturing style with the rapidly radio banned single Orgasm Addict.

But by the time of Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t)? pop pickers were more concerned with the retro sounds of John Travolta and Olivia Newton John whilst punk, with the Sex Pistols well on their way to total burn out, had sunk to the likes of Jilted John’s eponymously comic wimp anthem.

So Pete Shelley’s rapid fire love song was a breath of fresh air – and lyrically it was a cut above its competitors.
“You spurn my natural emotions
You make me feel I’m dirt and I’m hurt
And if I start a commotion
I run the risk of losing you and that’s worse” is quite some way to start a song before kicking into the memorable refrain: “Ever fallen in love with someone
Ever fallen in love, in love with someone
Ever fallen in love, in love with someone
You shouldn’t’ve fallen in love with?”.
The second verse is just as confessional:
“I can’t see much of the future
Unless we find out what’s to blame, what a shame
And we won’t be together much longer
Unless we realize that we are the same.”
After that it’s point made – a repeat of verse one a couple of refrain repeats and all’s done and dusted in around three minutes.
But what’s it all about? Writer Pete Shelley has been quoted as saying that the lyrics were inspired by a line from the musical Guys and Dolls:

“I wrote that while we were doing the Orgasm Addict tour. We were up in Edinburgh, stopping at the guest house, watching TV there, and it was the movie musical Guys and Dolls. One of the characters, Adelaide, is saying to Marlon Brando’s character, ‘Wait till you fall in love with someone you shouldn’t have.’ I thought, fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have? Hmm, that’s good.”

The BBC music website states that Shelley told a fanzine that the song was about a friend called Francis. “Ever Fallen In Love is such a universal song that Shelley shied away from talking about whom he had in mind when he wrote it. But he did reveal to the Outpunk fanzine that it was about a friend called Francis. In Buzzcocks – The Complete History, author Tony McGartland said the object of Shelley’s affections was Francis Cookson, who was in The Tiller Boys with Shelley and launched a label called Groovy Records with the singer.

“I lived with Francis for about seven years, and then he went off and got married in Switzerland,” Shelley said.
The singer said he fell in love when the pair started living together. “He was the first – well, the second – person that I actually lived with, so it was difficult at times.”

The Buzzcocks were formed in Bolton in 1976 by singer-songwriter-guitarist Pete Shelley (aka Peter McNeish) and Howard Devito (aka Howard Trafford). They are regarded as a seminal influence on the Manchester music scene, the independent record label movement, punk rock, power pop and pop punk. Devoto and Shelley chose the name “Buzzcocks” after reading the headline, “It’s the Buzz, Cock!”, in a review of the TV series Rock Follies in Time Out magazine.
Devoto left the band in 1977, after which Pete Shelley became the principal singer-songwriter. Shelley died on 6 December 2018, leaving the future of the band uncertain.

The song however has had a life of its own. A cover was released as a charity tribute single to the late DJ John Peel on 21 November 2005. It featured artists including Roger Daltrey (The Who), The Datsuns, The Futureheads, David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Peter Hook (New Order), Elton John, El Presidente, Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin), Pete Shelley and the Soledad Brothers. The single was supported by Peel’s son, Tom Ravenscroft, and proceeds went to Amnesty International.
UK band Fine Young Cannibals had a number nine UK hit (three places higher than The Buzzcocks’ original) with their soulful cover version, recorded for the soundtrack of the 1986 film Something Wild, which was later included on the band’s album The Raw & the Cooked[..

The band Thursday did a cover in 2005, featured on the soundtrack of Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland.. A cover by Pete Yorn appeared on the Shrek 2 soundtrack in 2004. Canadian punk rock band Pup performed a version in July 2014 for The A.V. Club’s A.V. Undercover series. More recently in 2011, a cover was made by the New Zealand soap opera Shortland Street for their winter season, with a jazzy feel, sung by Amanda Billing, who plays Sarah Potts. It fitted with the storyline of her character being pregnant with her ex-husband TK Samuels’s child and him having moved on with his fiancée. Her version reached no. 24 in New Zealand. French band Nouvelle Vague made a cover of the song for their 2006 album Bande à Part.

The song is still a staple of retro radio playlists – being the acceptable face of punk.

There are songs to leap up and down in the air to whilst trying not to spill your drink, songs for brides and grooms to take their first dance to without tripping up and songs for the last chance to cop for someone before heading home on your own.
But surely the best of all are those songs which make you want to fling your arms round whoever is within reach and sing along to at the top of your voice as if there’s no tomorrow.
And near the top of that list has got to be Andy Fairweather Low’s 1975 top ten hit Wide Eyed and Legless.
As songs with drinks as their theme go, it’s up there with Seven Drunken Nights, Whisky In the Jar, Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please and Chumbawamba’s anthemic Tubthumping.
But although we can all hug, hum and shout along with the chorus, it isn’t so much a song about the joys of inebriation as a guilty admission that alcohol dependence isn’t too great an idea.
It’s a habit that can’t be kicked: “It’s the same thing every night, but the rhythm of the glass is stronger than the rhythm of night”
Or to put it another way: “Wide eyed and legless, I’ve gone and done it again, wide eyed and legless. This world is full of my shame. Shame, I can’t get free from these chains.”
Despite all attempts to sober up, the singer’s sozzled again: “I’ve been here before but this time it feels like the end. I should’ve known better, I know. But my memory’s no friend. Well, I’ve tried everything that I know will get rid of this fling. And I can’t understand why I’m wide eyed and legless again.”
But why let sombre and sober be confused? Whilst we are enjoying a minute or two’s singalong-a-Low leave it to the po-faced Oxford Word blog to get to the bottom of things:
“The adjective legless is used as a slang term to describe someone who is extremely drunk, particularly someone who can no longer stand or walk. The earliest example we can find of this usage is from a 1975 song by Andy Fairweather-Low, Wide Eyed and Legless.
“We suspect that this is not the first instance of someone getting ‘legless’ and indeed the phrase ‘legless drunk’, with legless modifying drunk, can be traced back to the 1920s:
“She poured liquor into the bums, beggars, ragtags, and bobtails that hung around the saloons till they were legless drunk”: 1926 Jack Black in You Can’t Win.
So that’s all right then? Well, apart from dragging Watch With Mother favourites Rag, Tag and Bobtail into the proceedings at least.
Despite his very English sounding name, Andy Fairweather Low (sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not) was, in fact, Welsh having been born in Ystrad Mynach and first came to prominence in the Cardiff-formed band Amen Corner.
The band was named after The Amen Corner, a weekly gathering at Cardiff’s Victoria Ballroom (later to become The Scene Club), where every Sunday night the dj Dr Rock would play the best soul music from the United States.
Initially the band specialised in a blues and jazz-oriented style, but were steered by their record labels towards a more commercial sound.
Their first singles and album appeared on Decca’s subsidiary label, Deram but they left at the end of 1968 to join the cutting edge Immediate, where they were instantly rewarded with the chart topping (If Paradise Is) Half as Nice in early 1969, followed by another Top 5 entry with the Roy Wood composition Hello Susie.
Low’s boyish looks made him eminently pin-uppable and he had a distinctive vocal style – based on never actually looking like he was opening his mouth at all.
Initially a covers band – albeit a big sounding one with a great brass section – their chart debut was Gin House Blues, an alcohol fuelled blues classic probably dusted down because of the success of The Animals’ with House of the Rising Sun, and their biggest pre-Immediate hit involved kidnapping The American Breed’s excellent Bend Me Shape Me.
The original Amen Corner disbanded at the end of 1969 with Fairweather Low leading Dennis Byron (drums), Blue Weaver (organ), Clive Taylor (bass) and Neil Jones (guitar) into a new band, Fair Weather.
The band scored a UK hit with Natural Sinner in July 1970, although the outfit’s albums, Beginning From An End and Let Your Mind Roll On, failed to chart.
Having by now developed as a songwriter of some repute, after twelve months Fairweather Low left to pursue a solo career, releasing four albums up to 1980 and scoring hits with Reggae Tune (which actually wasn’t a reggae tune at all) in 1974, and Wide Eyed and Legless, a number six Christmas time hit in 1975.
In the late 1970s and 1980s he worked for numerous artists as a session musician, performing as a backing vocalist and guitarist on albums by Roy Wood, Leo Sayer, Albion Band, Gerry Rafferty, Helen Watson ]and Richard and Linda Thompson.
Other names he has been associated with – either in the recording studios or live on stage include The Who, Joe Satriani, Roger Waters, Linda Ronstadt, Eric Clapton and Bill Wyman.
In 2006 he released Sweet Soulful Music, his first solo album in twenty-six years. The song Hymn for My Soul became the title track of Joe Cocker’s 2007 album. Cocker’s tour of 2007/08 bore the same title.
But fans long for the day when he becomes Wide Eyed and Legless (in his own right) Again.

Remember when cassette tape compilations quietly replaced love letters as the way to someone’s heart?

How convenient it was to let someone else do the talking for you – although with at least one side of a C90 being the very minimum you could get away with, it could take considerably longer to sort out the definitive collection of love songs than pouring your soppy heart out over a sheet of A4 or a Valentine’s card shoplifted from Woolworth’s.

Presumably things have changed. Ever newer technology and social media means there are millions of suitable songs just waiting for the touch of a button to download – or you can simply text “happy birthday/Christmas/anniversary” etc etc. Just don’t forget the “X” or a suitable emoji.

Rubbish isn’t it? Where’s the romance? Where’s the thought? Where’s the quick quote you wished you’d created? Where’s John Martyn singing: “And may you never lay your head down without a hand to hold. May you never make your bed out in the cold.”
There, that’s it. Enough said in less than two dozen words. He even provides alternative additions to suit all sexes.
Try: “You’re just like a great strong brother of mine,
You know that I love you true
And you never talk dirty behind my back
And I know that there’s those that do.”
Or flip and go for: “Well you’re just like a good close sister to me,
You know that I love you true
And you hold no blade to stab me in the back
And I know that there’s some that do.”
Obviously you can adjust the brother and sister for more of a personalised romantic gesture. But it’s pretty all encompassing by the time Martyn reaches out with: “Oh please won’t you, please won’t you bear it in mind
Love is a lesson to learn in our time.
And please won’t you, please won’t you
Bear it in mind for me.”
And for those of us who, like the unpredictable Martyn, live life a bit more on the edge, he even adds: “May you never lose your temper if you get in a bar room fight.
May you never lose your woman overnight.”

A love song for everyone then? Certainly a song about loyalty, love and passion but seemingly much inspired by an actual bar room fight he allegedly did get into and a woman he did actually lose (more or less) overnight. Well, the thought was there.
John Martyn (aka Iain David McGeachy OBE – 11 September 1948 – 29 January 2009), released 22 studio albums over a 40 year career and received frequent critical acclaim.

Mentored by Hamish Imlach, Martyn began his professional musical career when he was 17, playing a fusion of blues and folk resulting in a distinctive style which made him a key figure in the British folk scene during the mid-1960s.

He signed to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records in 1967 and released his first album, London Conversation, the same year.

SOLID AIR

In 1973, he released one of the defining British albums of the 1970s, Solid Air, the title song a tribute to the singer-songwriter Nick Drake, a close friend and label-mate who died in 1974 from an overdose of antidepressants.

May You Never was track seven on the album. Originally released in November 1971 as a single in an early form. The song was re-recorded during the Solid Air sessions. The new version became something of a signature song for Martyn, as well as a staple of his live performances.

But it took some doing. When re-recording the song for Solid Air, he just couldn’t settle on a take that he was satisfied with. The night before producer John Wood was due to fly to New York to master the album, he was still waiting for the tape containing the tune.
“It was by then nearly midnight,” he recalled to Mojo magazine in April 2013. “So I said to him, For Christ’s sake, John, just go back down into the studio and play it again, and we’ll record it. And he did, and it’s great.”

Eric Clapton covered the song on his 1977 album Slowhand.

Martyn abused drugs and alcohol throughout his life. On the brink of major success he was derailed by his passion for musical exploration and by an appetite for excess that bordered on self-destruction. Martyn slid into alcoholism, his live performances punctuated by moments of incoherent drunkenness.

He died on 29 January 2009, in hospital in Thomastown, County Kilkenny, Ireland, due to acute respiratory distress syndrome. He was survived by his partner, Teresa Walsh, and his children, Mhairi and Spencer McGeachy.

ROLLING STONE

Following Martyn’s death, Rolling Stone lauded his “progressive folk invention and improvising sorcery.”

BBC Radio 2’s folk presenter Mike Harding said: “John Martyn was a true original, one of the giants of the folk scene. He could write and sing classics like May You Never and Fairy Tale Lullaby like nobody else, and he could sing traditional songs like Spencer The Rover in a way that made them seem new minted.”
As Scottish poet, novelist and essayist James Hogg (aka The Ettrick Shepherd, 1770 – 1835) said in Good Night, An’ Joy Be Wi Ye A’ – a poem Martyn surely must have read or had read to him by his Glaswegian grandmother:
“Ye hae been kind as I was keen,
An’ followed where I led the way,
Till ilka poet’s lore we’ve seen
O this an’ many a former day.
If e’er I led your steps astray,
Forgi’e your minstrel ance for a’;
A tear fa’s wi’ his partin’ lay-
Good night, an’ joy be wi’ ye a’! “

Not all Cliff Richard’s hits have stood the test of time particularly well. Miss You Nights is the exception.
Maybe it’s that if you set yourself up (or at least don’t sue the first person who called you that) as the “Peter Pan of Pop” your material (and indeed your personal life) will be subjected to the microscope of examination.

Over the years he has so often been in the right place at the right time (yes, ok, occasionally he’s been in the wrong place too) but when the UK needed an answer to Elvis here was the rapidly re-named Harry Webb to answer the call (granted the rock ‘n’ roll energy of 1958’s Move It and High Class Baby didn’t last long).

When we needed a film star he obliged with the likes of The Young Ones, Wonderful Life and Summer Holiday. And when our Eurovision hopes needed bailing out he obliged with Congratulations and its accompanying daft dance.

Christmas never used to officially start until Cliff’s festive contribution and whoever picked his material certainly had an ear for a hit in a changing pop world.

To that end Miss You Nights stands head and shoulders above most of his hits – having stood the test of time since its 1975 release remarkably well.

Over the years Sir Cliff (he was knighted in 1995) has lined quite a few pockets with writing royalties. None more so than Dave Townsend who wrote Miss You Nights in 1974 while his girlfriend was away on holiday. He recorded it for Island Records, but the label shelved the album it was on and decided to recoup part of the cost through cover deals on some of it songs. Some demo tapes were handed to Bruce Welch of The Shadows who also worked as producer for Cliff and was looking for material to revitalize his career after a spell of mid 20s and 30s peaks.

Welch immediately recognized it as a hit saying later: “Andrew Powell’s string arrangement helped to make it a great love song through its imagery and potent feelings of longing and loneliness.”

Welch and Cliff recorded it in September 1975. It was the lead single from Cliff’s studio album I’m Nearly Famous and reached number 15 in the UK charts. Despite the rather lowly placing it has become an enduring favourite of his fans and in 2006 UK BBC Radio 2 listeners voted it their top Cliff Richard song of all time.

Of the song and its writer Cliff said: “I think it’s one of the nicest songs I’ve ever made… when I heard his version it was terrific. He [Townsend] was pleased to have that happen. I mean it could have been anybody and it would have been a hit.”

It’s probably not true that Townsend subsequently sent his girlfriend away every year in the hopes he would be inspired to write another hit (Still Miss You and Don’t Miss You Quite As Much never really worked out).

Townsend was born in Somerset and aside from his intermittent solo career, he was also a vocalist for The Alan Parsons Project, singing lead vocals on Don’t Let it Show on the album, I Robot (1977), and You Won’t Be There from Eve (1979).

He was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award in 1977 for Best Middle of the Road Song with Miss You Nights – although the eventual winner was John Miles for Music. He also wrote Jimmy Ruffin’s That’s When My Loving Begins and Elaine Paige’s Far Side of the Bay.
By 2003 it was reported that he was writing a Ph.D. thesis in history at Essex University.

As for Miss You Nights, the song has been recorded by numerous other artists, most notably Westlife, who released it as the second track on a double A-side single in 2003. The Westlife single reached number 3 in the UK singles chart.

In 1994, Cliff Richard re-released the song on a double A-side single with All I Have to Do Is Dream, which was listed first. All I Have to Do Is Dream, originally by The Everly Brothers was recorded as a live duet with Phil Everly, while Miss You Nights is a remix of the 1976 original. The double A-side single reached number 14 in the UK singles chart.