The writing of this song proved true to its title; it took no more than a couple of hours before I had a complete set of lyrics. However, the arranging and recording of the song proved anything but "easy peasy".
From early on I knew the song needed a Tamla-Motown-style treatment; I had the Four Tops in mind as I sketched out the vocal arrangement and the backing track was inspired by that amazing, but anonymous (at least to the public) loose collective of Detroit session musicians known as the Funk Brothers who between them had more number one hits than Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones... combined!
So I modelled the drumming on the styles of Benny "Papa Zita" Benjamin and Richard "Pistol" Allen with my homage to the former in the drum fill just before the singing enters. That same fill occurs somewhere in just about every Motown song, most noticeably at the beginning of the Temptations' "My Girl". My debt to Richard "Pistol" Allen came in the snare hits, which I cranked up to near-maximum velocity.
The Funk Brothers' principal bass player, James Jamerson, used a Fender Precision bass with flat-wound strings and my Variax bass guitar emulates that to perfection, although I had to use a little post-processing to give the sound a little more body. The conga drums and tambourine were inspired by the playing of Eddie "Bongo" Brown and Jack Ashford respectively.
For the guitar parts I went a little off-piste. The guitar chords that open the song are my own invention, and the solo was based more on the style of Steve Cropper (of Booker T and the MGs, and Sam and Dave) although there is a little cross-genre country-funk going on in the "chicken pickin'" Telecaster licks.
Lastly I added a baritone sax honking down in the bass and a couple of trumpets playing staccato stabs.
So with that all in place it should have sounded like a classic Motown track.
But it didn't! It sounded mechanical and awkward.
For a couple of days I thought I would have to abandon the track as an heroic attempt but an ultimately flawed one.
Then I realised what was wrong. I had made everything too precise. The song has a four-in-a-bar triplet rhythm. Say "one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three" at a fast tempo to get the idea. But I had made the twos and threes too precise in their placement within the bar - mathematically correct but musically very wrong. The "twos" and "threes" should be slightly earlier than expected and the second and fourth "ones" slightly later. Luckily, through the miracle of modern recording techniques, these subtleties can be corrected without the need for re-recording.
I did it and suddenly the track came alive.
With the track mixed to my satisfaction I began work on the video. I modelled it on a 1965 televised black-and-white performance of the Four Tops "Something About You", videoing myself four times singing the parts then combining them into one montage. I added some "Top of the Pops" vintage footage of dancing girls and there it is - my homage to Tamla Motown.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it.