Here is a classic sixties song that I had never heard until a version by Misty Miller popped up in Lena Dunham’s excellent medieval comedy Catherine Called Birdy and sent me delving for the original.

Turns out the original version, by a classic sixties girl group called The Angels (who I’d never heard of either) reached No.1 in the US charts back in 1963. And if you want some really​ obscure pop trivia, the trumpeter here is none other than future heavy metal vocalist Ronnie (James) Dio.

Coming out in 1963, the year the Beatles and Stones transformed the pop landscape by writing and performing their own songs, it was one of the last pop hits to be created by an old-skool New York songwriting team in the Brill Building.

Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldestein and Richard Gottehrer were just one of the seemingly endless teams of young Jewish men (and the occasional woman like Carole King) churning out the hits – Leiber and Stoller, Bacharach and David, Goffin and King, even Paul Simon and Neils Diamond and Sedaka.

If we are to believe them, this song was inspired by Feldman witnessing an altercation when a high school girl accused a leather-jacketed boy of spreading lies about her after she rebuffed him, and warned him that her boyfriend was back to settle the score.

She supposedly even said the actual two phrases that became the lyric – “My boyfriend’s back and you’re gonna be in trouble… You’re gonna be sorry you were ever born” – but I’m not sure I believe that.

Especially after learning of the songwriting trio’s sleight of hand after jumping on the new rock’n’roll bandwagon for form a group called The Strangeloves – with a PR stunt of pretending to be Australian in order to seem more interesting.

It’s not a huge surprise to learn that the song was originally written for The Shirelles, because if you close your eyes it could easily be them.. or The Chiffons (who covered it soon after), or The Blossoms, or The Cookies, or The Shangri-Las, or pretty much any of those girl groups.

Instead, the publishers released it by the group who sang it on the demo they first heard – thus launching the career of The Angels, who came from New Jersey and consisted of sisters Barbara (aka Bibbs) and Phyllis (aka Jiggs) Allbut, and Peggy Santaglia.

They sold more than a million copies of this single, though they never repeated its success, even after changing their name to The Halos. Feldman went on to write I Want Candy and Sorrow (one of my favourite Bowie tunes), Goldstein managed Sly Stone and produced War, and Gottehrer co-founded Sire Records, bringing us Madonna, Blondie, The Ramones and Talking Heads.

Geniuses, all three of them.

* Oh, and you can catch Catherine Called Birdy on Amazon Prime: it’s a kind of medieval anti-rom-com in the mould of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with contemporary music and dialogue.