On My Radio

“Blinded By The Light” is one of those great 70s pre-punk singles that sounded brilliant coming out of a transistor radio during the summer holidays, getting you all revved up like a Chopper bike. For some reason I always think of Dave Lee Travis playing this, it’s a very Smashey & Nicey sort of record — big, overproduced, glittery, and made by men with hairy chests wearing Foster Grants.

As you probably know it was written by Bruce Springsteen and I’m not saying it’s a bad song but the lyrics are stupendously ridiculous, the convoluted ramblings of a young man who thinks that if the words are obscure enough they’ll sound like poetry — doctors call this condition “Dylan-itis” — so it’s full of nonsense like “Dethrone the dictaphone, hit it in its funnybone” and “little Early Burly came by in his curly wurly” that you need a code-breaking machine to decipher. The genius of the cover by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band is it sounds so fabulous you don’t notice that what they’re singing is daft bollocks. They set their Moog controls for the sun and flew right past the lyrics to create an epic that’s overblown and trippy in an Old Grey Whistle Test sort of way. To me back in 1976 it sounded like a space ship taking off.

This is the mega 7-minute version where they throw in everything but the kitchen sink from a big cosmic guitar solo to a bizarre bit when the piano player breaks into “Chopsticks.”

Download: Blinded By The Light – Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (mp3)
Buy: “The Roaring Silence” (album)

(I don’t have anything particularly insightful to add to the pile of tributes to Tony Wilson, as usual Marcello Carlin said it all better than most.)