I have loved this song since the day I first heard it, and I still love it just as much today. The only doubt I have ever had is whether I prefer it to Wah! Heat’s first single Better Scream.

I still can’t make up my mind; luckily, I don’t have to.

Seven Minutes To Midnight was the second and final single Pete Wylie’s band released under the first of their many Wah-related monikers. I first heard it, like so much else, on their first Peel session.

So that’s the version below.

I also have the single with its colourful red, yellow and blue sleeve, recorded by a line-up that had already changed since the first single a few months earlier.

It seems those three musicians who used to play together in The Crucial Three – namely Pete Wylie, Julian Cope and Ian McCulloch – shared egos the size of Liverpool itself, and the line-ups of their individual bands (Wah! Heat, The Teardrop Explodes and Echo & The Bunnymen) changed with frightening rapidity.

By the time Wah! Heat did the Peel session in May 1980 bassist Pete Younger had left and been replaced by Colm Redmond, who had in turn left to join Pink Military by the time the single was recorded, and been replaced by Carl Washington, with the group expanded to include a keyboard player called King Bluff.

I have never had a clue about the meaning of the song – co-written by Wylie, Washington, Mr Bluff and someone just called Jonie – but now learn that it’s a reference to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and its Doomsday Clock.

According to Wiki: “Back in 1980, in an atmosphere of increasing nuclear paranoia and failing détente over Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, the Bulletin moved the clock forwards two minutes, to the eponymous seven minutes to midnight.”

I never knew that, but I do know that whenever I have noticed my watch at 11.53pm at any point over the subsequent 43 years, I have tended to hear these opening guitar chords in my head and a voice singing these words.