Here's one that I was going to do for Pa's "No" week, but I just didn't get the time to sit down and record it. But it fits perfectly into Rick's time slot, written in the 60s by Tom Rush, but a hit here for The Walker Brothers in Jan '76. And some time after that, an incident which means that this song always takes me right back to a time and a place...
There was a girl at our school called Scarlett. How she ended up there I will never know - there were vague stories of her father being a European aristocrat, and she definitely had an air about her which said she was slightly above the rest of us. But she also had a very good voice - tuneful, soulful, and sometimes almost too powerful - and looks that had boys falling over as she passed by. And she knew it. And in turn, we all knew she was well out of our league. I got to know her slightly, working as the sound mixer on school musicals, but it never went much further than handing a microphone to her and then turning the volume down a bit when her voice went into overdrive.
At a school disco c.1976, she suddenly appeared at my side. "Steve - help me...there's a creep over there that keeps pestering me. Pretend you're my boyfriend". And with that she led me on to the dance floor. Now, acting has never been a strength of mine, but this was a role I did my best to excel at. I can't recall which record was playing to start with, but I remember only too well when the DJ suddenly slowed things down, and this song started. What was I to do, but go along with her request? When the music ended, she thanked me, and wandered off. The End.
But several years later....
One evening I turned on the radio to hear the DJ thank the band that had been in that night to do a live session - The Scarlett Wollenmann Band. That was her. But in the days before the internet and on-demand radio, I never did get to hear that session. More years later, when researching stuff became easier, I found out that she went on to become a bit of a star on the Italian music scene, singing on a few dance hits, and doing some power-ballad-ish things.
Sadly, in 1993, all of that pretty well came to an end when she was in a car accident which left her wheelchair-bound. There are a few clips of her on YouTube - here she is winding her voice up the way she always did
https://youtu.be/ZRD_Y7Go-44
Anyway, Scarlett, if you ever Google your own name and end up here, thanks for that dance.