There are many contenders for the ultimate driving song – Born To Be Wild, Highway Star, The Chain, Road To Nowhere. But for me there’s only one – Radar Love.
No one in England had ever heard of Golden Earring when their forgotten song reached No.7 in December 1973. But they had been going since 1961 in their native Netherlands, where they were the country’s top pop group.
Their first chart-topper there was the Eurovisiontastically-titled Dong Dong Diki Digi Dong before the band evoolved, via psychedelia – they do a great live version of The Byrds’ Eight Miles High which could sometimes last 45 minutes in concert – into a heavy rock outfit, touring with Hendrix, Clapton, Rush and Led Zeppelin.
Radar Love, with its relentlessly monotonous rhythm, propelled by that insistent snare drum and the burbling bassline, makes you feel you’re on the highway in the dead of night even before that memorable first line: “I’ve been driving all night, my hands wet on the wheel.”
It’s such a classic. Especially the bit in the middle where the guitar follows the vocal melody note for note around that couplet: “The radio plays a forgotten song, Brenda Lee’s ‘Coming On Strong’.”
It would be literally decades before I found out Brenda Lee was not the girlfriend he’s driving through the night to meet, but an actual singer. And – confession time – it’s only now that I discover Coming On Strong is one of her songs.
Before that I just thought Ms Lee (whoever she was) was “coming on strong” either in the sense that she was making saucy suggestions through telepathy, or that the driver was getting a good signal from the radio station on his car radio.
I’m sure I’m not alone. And when I went to listen to Coming On Strong on YouTube, I found I was far from alone – most of the comments come from Golden Earring fans.
So, through my circuitous investigations, I seem to have unwittingly proved that it really is a “forgotten song.” As is, in another way, Radar Love itself – in the sense that I had forgotten to post it when I was going through the hits of 1973. Until now.
And the band, I am delighted to discover, is still going strong with the same four members it had half a century ago.