Amid the visceral energy and tuneless thrashing of punk, a label called Beserkley somehow surfed along on the New Wave with a bunch of records that reminded us what a tune was. This was one of the best examples – a jangly version of a song from Springsteen’s debut album by a bloke called Greg Kihn.

It perfectly encapsulates the label’s signature sound of Power Pop, matching the energy of crunchy guitars to sixties-influenced melodic hooks and harmonies.

Like punk, the short sharp tunes were a back-to-basics reaction against the overblown crimes of prog rock, though Kihn became big enough to open regularly at arena shows by huge bands like The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead and Journey in the eighties.

When he first appeared in 1975 on the label’s introductory compilation Beserkley Chartbusters Volume 1 – the album that introduced us to Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner – Kihn was an unknown newcomer who had recently moved to the San Francisco area from his east coast hometown in Baltimore and was working as a house painter.

This was one of the first singles the label put out and like all the others it was produced by label owner and founder Matthew ‘King’ Kaufman, whose own band Earth Quake put out the very first, a cover of The Easybeats’ Friday On My Mind.

At the time I don’t think I’d heard Bruce Springsteen‘s version from his 1972 debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., so I probably assumed For You was a new song. Kihn’s version shortens the Boss’s powerfully poignant (but lengthy) lyric about an English girlfriend who had attempted suicide and plays down its melancholia.

Greg Kihn stayed with Beserkley until the label collapsed in the mid-eighties.

By far their most successful artist, The Greg Kihn Band had a couple of big US hit singles with The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write ‘Em) and Jeopardy, which reached No.2 in 1983. He has since become a successful author of horror novels.