Harley went back to HQ, “handed Judy Teen to EMI and said: ‘Is that your single?’” Harley recalls the dalliance fondly: “Like it says in the lyrics, she was in from New York. Orgasmic couplets spurt freely, with references to “superballs” and her as his “queen of the scene” and “rag doll amore”. I said to Alan: ‘That’s a really good trick.’ And he went: ‘Yeah, I nicked it from Roy Wood.’ There’s a Move single with that sound on it, which Roy had come up with. The ‘dum-dum-dum-crash’ sound is actually three of us leaning over the wooden staircase that goes down to the studio and control room, with us mic’d-up and slapping the rail with our open palms.
“I wrote all the drum pattern myself,” he explains, “and told Stuart what to do. Everywhere you listened there were hooks, just as Harley had promised. The entire thing was driven by Milton ReamesJames’s keyboard riff and Stuart Elliott’s staccato drum beat. Hence, perhaps, the inclusion of a Celtic instrumental break. In Cockney Rebel signature style, there was no lead guitar, choosing instead to peak on the electric violin riffs of Jean-Paul Crocker, with whom Harley had been in the pre-Rebel folk ensemble Odin. Harley’s accentuated vocals were a curious mix of Ray Davies and Maurice Chevalier.
The resulting Judy Teen was typically distinctive, an odd, quasi-calypso pop song that could easily double as some dark, Anglo-European nursery rhyme. “He’d come up through The Beatles and Pink Floyd, and we went into No.2 Studio, where The Beatles recorded.” “I went in there with Alan Parsons, who was really just an engineer then,” explains Harley.
Cockney Rebel were duly packed off to Abbey Road to record it.
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