Wreckless Eric is a national treasure. He would be one even if he’d never made another record after his 1977 masterpiece Whole Wide World. Yet here he is, nearly half a century later, with another simple but striking song that you can’t get out of your head; it arrived in my inbox this morning and now I can’t get it out of mine.

There’s very little to it: a simple strum of an acoustic guitar, a crashing powerchord, a surreal lyric about how “There ain’t no goodhats there in badhat town”… and a miniature guitar solo at the end. It’s perfect, and in an ideal world (or maybe just in the past) it would top the singles chart all summer long.

I don’t know what Badhat Town means, but I like Eric’s description of “A grubby pub where the n’er-do-wells congregate – a weasel-faced man wearing a camouflage hat covered in fishing lures and fashioned into a Robin Hood style bonnet…a nasty silence, an uncomfortable conversation…someone addresses you as ‘friend’, the promise of impending unpleasantness.”

We’ve all been there.

I don’t know where he’s been either; at least I didn’t until I read about how quickly Eric Goulden tired of the music biz, the mechanics of fame and even his stage name. So he “crawled out of the spotlight and disappeared into the underground,” releasing twentysomething albums in fortysomething years under various names – The Len Bright Combo, Le Beat Group Electrique, The Donovan Of Trash, The Hitsville House Band, and with his wife as one half of Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby.

Finally realising he was stuck with the name Wreckless Eric – and thank heavens for that. What makes this comeback all the more remarkable is that Covid hit him hard, damaging his lungs and giving him a heart attack. “I almost died in the emergency room. I began to feel extremely…mortal. I began to look at where I’ve been and where I come from. Maybe to get my mind off the ultimate destination.”