This is the first time I ever heard Johnny Cash, when he had a Top Five hit in May 1972 with A Thing Called Love.
I bet there aren’t many people who know this was his biggest hit in Europe. Or even remember it at all. But it matched the No.4 spot reached by A Boy Named Sue.
Written by Jerry Reed in 1968, and covered by Elvis, among many others, it’s got such a great lyric – “Six foot six he stood on the ground / He weighed two hundred and thirty-five pounds” – delivered in that inimitable gravelly growl.
Then the choir coming in to sing the chorus. Classic ‘beauty and the beast’ stuff that I never get tired of, from Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra through Sonny and Cher to Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan.
And of course, being a classic country song, there’s that little sermon at the end where Johnny assures us that he, too, has struggled with doubt, and troubled his mind day in and day out, before being redeemed by love.
And to illustrate the point, in this clip he gets to show us by bringing his wife onstage with the introduction: “Here’s that woman that *I* love ladies’n’gennamen… June Carter.’
Also immortalised in The Royle Family when Jim and Nana finally bond before she dies.