While his brother bounced around the stage like a hyperactive spaniel, the moustachioed piano player looked like a bank clerk from the 1950s, giving deadpan glances to the camera as he stabbed at the keyboard.
No one knew what to make of their theatrical performance. Or of the even more theatrical song, which fitted no known genre of music and included gunshots out of a Western movie.
In fact Ron and Russ had been around a while. They had actually formed in their native Los Angeles back in 1967 (as Urban Renewal Project, then Halfnelson) and released two albums (their debut produced by Todd Rundgren) before moving to London in 1973.
It was around this time that my friend Duncan answered an ad in the Melody Maker for a bass guitarist (“Must be beard free and exciting,” it stipulated) and found himself auditioning for them at a house they were renting in south London from David Bowie.
He didn’t get the gig (probably because, although beard-free, he is far from exciting) which was a shame for him as they rapidly shot to stardom, thanks to this song – and thanks largely to Ron’s peculiar performance on Top of the Pops, with his sideways glances and his Hitler moustache (“It was news to me,” he told me when I interviewed them, “I was going for Charlie Chaplin.”).
The gunshot, incidentally, was added by the sound engineer Dave Hutchins, borrowing a BBC sound effects LP from his previous job with the corporation.
Like everyone else, I loved this song and bought the LP Kimono My House – and the following year I got to see them live (one of my first gigs) at Taunton Odeon. And again in 2011 with Dave Ball.