rock 'n' roll cluedo

... but the song that really set me on the path was Gerry & the Pacemaker's How Do You Do It? I was 12 or 13, and still remember the when, where & with what: Sunday evening, in the bathroom, with the radio. In those days we lived in a rented flat above the Chemist's shop on Main Street, Greytown. The old mantle radio was not in the bathroom, probably one of my sisters was listening to it in her bedroom but somehow that song just came out and claimed me for its own. I heard it perfectly, can hear it now. Haven't yet gone looking for it in the ether. In a way I wish it had been the Rolling Stones' Paint it Black or the Yardbirds' Shapes of Things or even A Whiter Shade of Pale, the first single I bought ... yeah, left it on the back seat of my mother's Hillman Imp, it buckled in the sun, never played it ... but they all came later. Yet, in the anthropology of 60's pop, that song (How Do You Do ... ) has a place. Written by Mitch Murray, it was offered in the first instance to The Beatles, who knocked it back because they wanted to record a song of their own: Please Please Me it was called. Mitch also wrote I'm Telling You Now for Freddy and the Dreamers; Ballad Of Bonnie and Clyde for Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames; and Billy, Don't Be A Hero for Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods.