That playful piano melody sets the scene for some splendid wordplay from Harley, his lyrics somewhere between Bowie and Dylan in their exotic enjoyment of language.
His delivery is extraordinary too, rolling words around his mouth with relish as he tells a story filled with exotic allusions, taking us from Amsterdam to Barcelona.
It’s a tribute to the fictional cricketer and gentleman burglar ‘Raffles’ created by EW Hornung in a series of short stories popular a century ago and features some creepy found sounds – samples, even – including the noise of a bullring audience and a fairground (a favourite Harley motif) – and a big change of key, and pace, for a reggaeish chorus.
Harley – a devout Christian then, as now – says he used Raffles not to send up the gullibility of the upper classes, but as an allegory for the way we choose to see religion and religious leaders.
Sometimes they are a sham (“Man it was mean to be seen in the robes you wore for Lent / You must’ve known that it was Easter”), at other times the Devil within (“Then in Amsterdam you were perfect fun, You never let on you had a gun / And then you shot that Spanish dancer”.
Declining to explain further, he argued that the meaning was “obvious to listeners”, adding: “It’s not T.S. Eliot, I know, but I was a serious young man!”
The song was the second single from Harley’s third album The Best Years Of Our Lives (the album version is a minute longer) but failed to match the chart-topping success of the previous one, Make Me Smile.
It was produced by Harley with Alan Parsons, the former Beatles engineer and the single is backed with a wonderful 10-minute live version of Sebastian, their first single, recorded at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1975 with new guitarist Snowy White joining the band, alongside drummer Stuart Elliott’s younger brother Lyndsey on percussion.
Sadly, film of the band’s performance on Top of the Pops in June 1975 was accidentally erased by the BBC, though the audio file remains.