I have a personal interest in this because the group came from Beckenham, south London (though the postal address is Kent) where I grew up. One of the members was Andy Bown, whose sister Lorely was in the year above me at school, and another was Peter Frampton, who went out with a girl called Mary Lovett in my year. They later married (and even later divorced).
This song was written by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley and it was their biggest hit, reaching No 5 in Britain in 1968.
That is a great song. Andy Bown was later in Status Quo of course, and tells some amusing tales on their documentary DVD “Hello Quo”.
I enjoyed the accompanying promotional film short (they weren’t called videos until later) and the scenes of the Thames. I’ve got a book on my very long to-read list called “Mudlarking” by Lara Maiklam, about her archaeological finds in the mud of the Thames. It’s got good reviews and I’m looking forward to reading it; heres the blurb:
Lara Maiklem has scoured the banks of the Thames for over fifteen years, in pursuit of the objects that the river unearths: from Neolithic flints to Roman hair pins, medieval buckles to Tudor buttons, Georgian clay pipes to Victorian toys. These objects tell her about London and its lost ways of life.
Moving from the river’s tidal origins in the west of the city to the point where it meets the sea in the east, Mudlarking is a search for urban solitude and history on the River Thames, which Lara calls the longest archaeological site in England.
As she has discovered, it is often the tiniest objects that tell the greatest stories.