The rest of their stuff was ballady bollocks with soft safe harmonies.
But this one? It rocked like a… well, like a crazy horse. It had that neighing sound that turned out to be Donny, the teen pin-up we all hated, attacking a synth with gusto. And it’s got a ‘green’ anti-pollution message, long before that became fashionable – and, under Trump, unfashionable again.
It was a deliberate change of direction by a band that was tired of being treated as puppets, hoist by the petard of their own success. “Before (Crazy Horses) my brothers and I had been what’s now called a boy band,” Merrill said later.
“All our songs were chosen for us by the record company. But now, having been successful, we wanted to freak out and make our own music. We were rehearsing in a basement one day when Wayne started playing this heavy rock riff… this track was heavier than anything we’d ever done.”
Indeed it was. It also featured a different lead singer, Jay, who had a growlier voice, while Merrill conributes the high-pitched bit: “There they go, smoking up the sky” – and Wayne chips in with a rudimentary guitar solo.
Predictably, their record company was sceptical about its chances of doing well, but it proved to be their breakthrouigh hit in the UK and the rest of Europe, reaching No.2 here. Sadly, it was a bit of a one-off and they went back to singing dross like Love Me For A Reason after this.
Still, if you look at this as a one-hit wonder, it’s a great one. the “neighing stallion” was added later after Alan – who wrote the lyrics, full of references to horsepower – was anxious to incorporate a horsey sound on the record. Up stepped Donny and his synth.
As Jay later said: “Crazy Horses was way ahead of its time. It’s a song about ecoslogy and the environment – those ‘crazy horses smoking up the sky’ are gas-guzzling ars destroying the planet with their fumes.”
That seemed pretty obvious to me, even at the age of 14, but not to the censors in South Africa, who interpreted the word ‘horses’ as referring to heroin, or in France where they thought “smoking up the sky” was a druggy reference. Both of them banned it.