Medicine Head were a distinctive duo who had a handful of hits in the early Seventies, beginning with One And One Is One.

A few years ago at a music event I was introduced to an old man with very long white hair who told me he had once been in a pop group. “Before your time,” he assured me modestly when I asked who they were.

I persisted and he told me they had been called Medicine Head. I was thrilled because they were not before my time at all but very much part of my teens. I remembered them well, and this was their first (and biggest) hit, with an odd sort of cod-reggae rhythm a bit like Paul Simon’s Mother And Child Reunion, but with the addition of a bluesy slide guitar and a Jew’s harp.

The group seem to have been a duo of John Fiddler, the singer with the guitar and John Lennon glasses – and, in later life, the long white hair – and Peter Hope-Evans, the one with the massive Afro and the Jew’s harp. They were born three days apart in 1947 and met at school in Wolverhampton, going on to study at Stafford Art School, and began playing on the local club and pub circuit, where they were spotted by John Peel.

By the time this was a hit, Medicine Head had already made three albums for Peel’s Dandelion label, at the insistence of John Lennon. Their first single, His Guiding Hand, was described by Peel as “one of the cheapest, and one of the classic records of all time” and Fiddler’s fragile singing voice sounds uncannily like Antony/Anohni of Antony & The Johnsons.

* Pop trivia fact: their third album was called Dark Side Of The Moon. It came out in 1972, causing another band to consider changing the name of their work in progress – until the Medicine Head album was a flop.