It’s embarrassing to admit I discovered Chuck Berry through this dismal double entendre-strewn novelty song. And dreadful that something so execrable gave Chuck – one of the most influential musicians of all time and the man who invented rock’n’roll almost single-handedly – his only number one record.

It’s symptomatic of that early-Seventies period where British comedy was rooted in smut, and particularly in double entendres, exemplified in everything from the Carry On films to Frankie Howerd, Dick Emery, Benny Hill and The Two Ronnies.

I never had a clue that this was a cover version, which explains why it has so little in common with the rest of Chuck’s repertoire. It was written and originally recorded by bandleader Dave Bartholomew way back in 1952, though the melody is apparently based on a 19th century folk song called Little Brown Jug, later popularised by the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

Chuck first recorded a version in 1968 – then called My Tambourine (“I do like to shake my tambourine”) – but the chart topping version was recorded live at the Locarno Ballroom in Coventry in 1972 where he performed with a band including Van Der Graaf Generator’s bassist, Nic Potter, and Robbie McIntosh who would soon go on to form The Average White Band with the guitarist, Onnie McIntryre.

The show was part of the Lanchester Arts Festival, where Churck turned up an hour and a half late (no change there), and was followed onstage by Pink Floyd and Slade.

This song, with the audience encouraged to sing along in single-sex groups (the women singing “I want you to play with my” and the men responding with “ding-a-ling-a-ling”), is bad enough in its four-minute single form, but far far worse in the full 11-minute version on the subsequent album.

Of course, Chuck being a notorious pervert and tax dodger, he couldn’t have cared less. He enjoyed the “dirt… nice clean dirt” of the lyrics and, much more than that, he enjoyed the £200,000 he made from its success.

He probably also enjoyed Mary Whitehouse, the self-appointed arbiter of Seventies morals, complaining to the BBC after a schoolteacher wrote to complain that a class of boys were singing the song “with their trousers undone.”

All the more so when the DG of the day defended the song, saying: “The innuendo is, at worst, on the level of seaside postcards or music hall humour.” He got that right but still could have done us all a favour by banning it.