Paul Fitzpatrick: Summer (the first time) 2024

I’m no connoisseur of cheese but I can tell the difference between Dairylea and Burrata, and so it is with cheesy pop songs.

Whilst some are hurriedly processed others are crafted to mature with age.

In the early to mid 70s there was always at least one cheesy summer song that would transmit through the airwaves directly into my consciousness, and it was mortifying.

I was growing my hair long (or wide in my case), I was listening to the Who and Deep Purple, I was even sporting double denim for Christs sake, yet there I was inadvertently singing along to ‘Me and You and a Dog Named f****ing Boo’ by Lobo, a soppy song about a dude, his old lady and an Alsatian embarking on a road trip.

I later found out that the only reason the dog was included as part of this odyssey was because Boo rhymed with you, hardly Jack Kerouac then.

However, against my better judgement I couldn’t help but like this gooey piece of bubblegum pop, it was so melodic and who doesn’t love a song with a dog in it?

I had no idea until I watched Top of the Pops that Lobo wasn’t even a band, it was a bloke called Kent LaVoie who looked a lot like the Radio One DJ, Ed (Stewpot) Stewart.

As it turned out I wasn’t the only sad git who liked this song as it was a top 10 hit from Auckland to Albuquerque in the summer of 71.

If that wasn’t bad enough 1973 brought us Bobby Goldsboro’s ‘Summer (the first time)’, a song that was the antithesis of everything I was supposed to like.
Again it was the melody that grabbed me, along with that hypnotic, repetitive, piano riff and a lavish production that peaked with cinematic strings at the songs finale.

I was just turning 15 in 1973 when this piece of schmaltz infiltrated my brain so you don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to deduce why it resonated a bit more than it should have.

I also remember the accompanying video which was the visual equivalent of an Athena Poster in soft focus, and of course the killer punchline, just before the not so subtle crescendo of crashing waves…….

‘We sat on the sand where the boy took her hand but I saw the sunrise as a man’

Leaving school, surely my penchant for cheesy summer love songs had been exhausted, I was splashing on Brut like Enry Cooper now and could just about grow a moustache, humming along to such songs wasn’t in the manual!

But then it happened again – the bloody Starland Vocal Band with ‘Afternoon Delight’

Here we go again, the melody, the amazing harmonies, the steel guitar, I loved it but I wasn’t going to be playing it on a jukebox anytime soon, no one likes to be laughed at.

When I eventually saw the band on Top of the Pops, they were like a Hillbilly version of Abba.

Amazingly, on first listen I didn’t even take in the obvious context of the song, Afternoon Delight for me meant double PE (gym class).

‘Sky rockets in flight’ indeed!

Like all my cheesy musical aberrations, this was another song to be hidden away like an embarrassing teenage diary, so imagine my delight 30 years on when the song turned up in the movie Anchorman.

Surely only cool songs get parodied.

Vindicated at last!