123 or 1-2-3

It never ceases to amaze me how, yet again, seemingly unrelated old memories can be triggered by songs.  There I was, browsing a post over at RockRoots about Spanish one-hit-wonders Los Bravos, like you do, and the memories attached to their mighty opus, ‘Black is Black’ came flooding back.  For some reason they involve the purchase of my first bike, a handsome blue-framed affair, and why I inexplicably decided to cover it with football stickers.  ‘Black is Black’ with its Gene Pitney-esque vocal is one of those songs that define my childhood as a sixties kid but quite why the bike is involved is beyond me.

This post also led me on to musing about other sixties one-offs and it was then that a fragment of a song forced its way into my consciousness.  I could hum it with reasonable certainty yet couldn’t quite get a handle on its entirety.  As much as I tried I just couldn’t remember who sang it or what it was called.  It went…er, let me see…

One two three…

Da da da daah da da dah

Da-da-da-dah, da da da dah da dah

It’s easy (it’s so easy)

Like taking candy, FROM A BABY!

First I tried searching all the possible singers.  The timbre of the voice suggested singers like Andy Fairweather-Low (Amen Corner), Chris Farlowe, Frankie Valli or Barry Ryan but no luck with any of them.

I then tried every ‘find your song through its lyric’ website I could find, but none of them could reveal it despite using all the keywords like ‘123’, ‘candy’ and ‘baby’.  I tried my old standby, Everyhit.com but it still didn’t come up.  It was only days later that it suddenly popped into my head.  Of course!  It was ‘1-2-3’ by Len Barry.  Hurrah!  I’d got the song title right all along but all the lyric sites I’d consulted didn’t recognise ‘123’ in place of the official title of ‘1-2-3’.  Search engines eh?  Who writes these things?

The other discovery I’ve made about this single is that Len Barry is actually an American where I’d just assumed he was British.  My apologies to my US readers for taking the credit for this single for well over 40 years but I’m putting the record straight now.  In my defence, ‘1-2-3’ does have a very British feel to it and during the 1960s beat boom it is perhaps not surprising that it does.

Funnily enough, this one doesn’t have a specific memory attached to it; it was just sort of…there.  I still love it, so here it is.  Nice suit!!