Motown songwriting legend Eddie Holland wrote, sang and produced the soul song that would one day become Motorhead’s debut single.

I know this song well – just not by Eddie Holland. I’d only heard it, performed very differently on Top of the Pops. In 1977 it shook the foundations of the BBC studio when it was played by a new band formed by a former member of Hawkwind.

A year earlier, Lemmy had been chucked out of what was surely one of the druggiest bands around, either for taking too many drugs – or (depending on who you ask) for taking the wrong drugs.

Acid and pot were fine, as I understand it, but lifelong speed freak Lemmy’s preferred stimulant was apparently unacceptable to his hippy bandmates.

Lemmy’s hard-rocking new trio, Motorhead, were quite a different beast from the space rockers: a hybrid of heavy metal played in the primal spirit of the emerging punk rock movement.

This was their debut single in 1977.

Back then I had no idea it was a cover version, and I would have been highly surprised to learn it originated on the Motown label 14 years earlier.

Even when I did, I associated Eddie Holland not as a performer but as one-third of Motown’s legendary songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland (with his brother Brian and Lamont Dozier).

Eddie was the lyricist for the trio who effortlessly churned out 143 hits – including a dozen number ones – for The Supremes, The Temptations, The Four Tops, The Isley Brothers, Martha Reeves & The Vandellas and more.

Before that he was a recording artist in his own right, recording 20 solo singles, including one minor hit – Jamie – and a solitary album in the late ’50s and early ’60s, before stage fright sent him back to the studio to work behind the scenes.

After the trio left Motown, they set up the Invictus and Hot Wax labels, creating more hits throughout the ’60s and well into the next decade, though their last release was as recently as 1999, after Holland-Dozier-Holland reunited to compose the score for a musical production of First Wives Club.