Like everybody else I didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp in admiration when I first heard this. The Flying Lizards took Eddie Cochran’s 1958 hit Summertime Blues and deconstructed it to the point where the original barely existed.

It’s got a repetitive clanking beat overlaid with fuzzy electronic bursts that might once have been played on a guitar. The masterstroke is Deborah Evans-Stickland’s flat, bored, tuneless spoken vocal, draining the song of all emotion and passion. Which was the whole point.

Best of all is the deadpan call-and-response chorus with David Cunningham, the Irish avant-garde composer and visual artist David Cunningham who created the record.

He had already self-released an album of minimalist music called Grey Scale back in 1975, while studying film and video at art school in Canterbury, when he borrowed equipment to record this.

Cunningham claimed the single cost just £20 to make and after it was turned down by a number of labels, Virgin Records picked it up for release in 1978, assured that it was inexpensive enough to recoup its costs quickly.

Released under the name The Flying Lizards, Summertime Blues attracted enough press attention to sell a few thousand copies, putting the project solidly in the black.

Flushed with success, Cunningham took another stab at reconfigured pop by performing the same minimalist deconstruction on Money, Motown’s first ever hit back in 1958 by Barrett Strong but best known for the version on the second album by The Beatles five years later.

It gave The Flying Lizards their first and only hit single, peaking at number 5 in the pop charts and ensuring their immortality as one-hit wonders. But this one could – and should – have been a hit too.