Here is another slice of white reggae from the dusty depths of my singles collection. I remember the cover art – by Ralph Steadman – as well as I recall the single.

I remember less about the band, beyond the fact that I have their first two albums – Word Salad and Going Deaf For A Living. And I am grateful to Wiki for solving the mystery of their odd name, which is apparently a pun on “fish’s head” – something that has taken me 45 years to discover.

Peddling an eclectic variant of New Wave music, Fischer-Z were mostly a vehicle for guitarist and singer John Watts, who formed the band at Brunel University in 1976, where he studied clinical psychology, with fellow student Steve Skolnik on keyboards.

Watts alternated between a Sting-like higher register, as on this – their debut single in January 1979 – and a more conventional baritone, with the band completed by drummer Steve Liddle and Dave Graham on bass.

There was another great single, The Worker, and the second album produced a minor hit in So Long but they broke up after a third effort, Red Skies Over Paradise, in 1981 and Watts and Graham went on to form The Cry before the front man went solo.

Watts has made 11 solo albums, and 10 more under the revived Fischer-Z name, and is still active with a project called World Go Round: a multimedia combination of a play entitled The Last Picasso, an album called World Go Round and poetry book called The Grand National Lobotomy.