From home is where we’re all doing things at the moment. It brought this to mind.

(Not that the song has anything to do with coronavirus. Keep safe everyone.)

It was the B-side of Wild Thing, at least in the UK.

There’s that earthy very Troggy quality to this and listening to it again it presages both punk and Adam and the Aunts.

There’s a video clip here of the group performing it live in 1967.

Innerleithen is a small town on the A 72 in Tweeddale, the Scottish Borders, in Peebleshire as was.

For a few years in the 1960s my grandfather (the original Jack Deighton) and grandmother Margery, lived in the town. It’s been one of my favourite places ever since.

Innerleithen War Memorial is an erect stone slab set in the grounds of the Memorial Hall off the B 709, at the junction between Leithen Road and Chapel Street. The gate is inscribed Innerleithen War Memorial:-

Dedications. “Pro Patria” inside a wreath flanked by “1914 – 1918,” Great War Names.”1939 – 1945,” and an additional lower plaque for a 1939 – 1945 addended name:-

The usual output of Kenny Rogers who died last weekend, The Gambler, Coward of the County etc, isn’t really my cup of tea. It is undeniable however that he had a big following.

I had been toying with the idea of using this group’s second UK hit in this spot for some while and this would have been an ideal opportunity but I decided its title might be a little insensitive in connection with someone recently deceased. (It was also from 1970.)

Here’s one that wasn’t a UK hit at all but whose refrain has stuck in my mind for all those years – without me really remembering who had sung it.

I note that Kenny’s Guardian obituary (see link above) says Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town, the group’s first UK hit, was written from the viewpoint of a Vietnam veteran. At the time the story was that “the crazy Asian war” of the song’s lyric was actually the Korean War.

Kenneth Donald (Kenny) Rogers: 21/8/1938 – March 20/3/2020. So it goes.

“Match of the Day’s the only way to spend your Saturday.”

Not at the moment it isn’t.

A song from simpler times. “We paid four hundred thousand pounds for him. You realise that?” Nowadays that wouldn’t go near buying you a top player’s big toe.

Curiously this isn’t the only football reference in a Genesis song (‘a goal can find you a role on a muddy pitch in Newcastle, where it rains so much, you can’t wait for a touch of sun and sand,’ from Mad Man Moon on the Trick of the Tail album.)

Another band from Sweden. Odd choice of name though.

This wasn’t a hit for Lesley Gore in the UK (those came only with It’s My Party and Maybe I Know) but when it soars into the chorus with “Don’t tell me what to do…” it is absolutely representative of songs from the early 1960s, though the sentiment it embodies wasn’t.

This seems to have been Santana’s first hit in the UK though if asked I’d have thought Black Magic Woman or Oye Como Va had got there before it. Memory is a funny thing.

This is the sort of guitar-based music you don’t tend to hear these days.

This song had an old-fashioned feel even in 1998 when it was a big hit in the UK but it has such a good Latin-tinged upbeat swing to it you can’t help but be drawn in.

And, rather than fading out, it actually ends. What more could you ask?

Where does this stand in the panoply of Beach Boys’ singles?

Not very high if you go by its chart placing (no 29 in the UK.)

But to me it’s up there. Not as high as God Only Knows or Good Vibrations certainly, but it’s from that time when the Beach Boys were in their mid-60s pomp.

And it’s also not all that Beach Boys-y.