The Average White Band never had a number one hit single but two of them – drummer Robbie McIntosh and guitarist Onnie McIntyre – did… with Chuck Berry.

They were members of Chuck’s backing band when he sang the chart-topping embarrassment My Ding-A-Ling. This vastly superior tune only reached no.6 and definitively proved that, contrary to received wisdom at the time, white boys most definitely COULD play hardcore funk. Even ginger Scottish ones.

Pick Up The Pieces was recorded in Miami with the legendary Arif Mardin producing for Atlantic Records. Malcolm ‘Molly’ Duncan, who plays the sax solo, told the rest of the group they were mad even to consider putting out “a funk instrumental played by Scotsmen, with no lyrics other than a shout.”

That, of course, may be the key to its success. In the pre-pop video era, people in the funk fraternity who had heard the song on the airwaves had no idea what the band looked like, and would regularly turn up to their gigs and be surprised to find they were white.

Like their first album, their second flopped after its release in 1974 but this tune was picked up by American DJs as disco began to blossom there, and rose to the top of the US charts, prompting a successful re-release in the UK.

The AWB formed after various musicians who had jammed together in various jazz and soul groups in Scotland came down to London and met by chance at a Traffic concert.

They began rehearsing and got their name when a friend remarked that their sound was “too much for the average white man,” making their debut supporting Eric Clapton – another white man with a passion for black music (if not the people who made it) – at the Rainbow Theatre in 1973.

Pick Up The Pieces came from AWB’s second album and reappeared on their 1976 live album Person To Person in an extended 18-minute version – and an even longer 21-minute take live at Montreux the following year featuring an extended sax solo by Michael Brecker.

Sadly, McIntosh, their youngest member, never lived to enjoy its success, having died of an accidental heroin overdose taken at a Hollywood party in September 1974. He was 24.

As guitarist Hamish Stuart said of their attempts to cope with his death: “It went from being a song about being skint to being a song about Robbie.” More recently it was included in the official Biden & Harris 2021 Inauguration Playlist.