If you read my previous post about this kind of thing, you’d know I’m doing a rundown of my most popular songs according to Spotify. And I’m writing about them in my best telephone voice.

At number 9 is Go To Bed.

This song is on my album It Just Is but is, I think, best known, at least in Liverpool, as a song by The Tambourines.

I wrote it when I lived, forlornly, in a tiny house in Banner Street, Wavertree. I can’t remember the why’s and wherefores, but I liked the D-Dm change in the chorus and playing it in waltz time, it felt comforting. I’d been trying to go back to the roots of Merseybeat with the songs I wrote for The Tambourines so I cut out the major 7ths and suspended chords I’d used with 16 Tambourines. Just majors and minors. The Beatles used lots of major 7ths though, so… I was very unhappy and my life felt like I was just getting off my head and arguing with people.

The Tambourines version was massive, like a bomb going off and there’s a studio recording somewhere but I don’t think we did it justice. I don’t think this version does it justice either. I’d like to record it again sometime.

At a gig in Bristol, we came off stage and a bald headed woman handed me a spliff and said “I want to record that Go to Bed song”. It was Sinead O’Connor. A few months later, I think the Tambourines had split up or were on the verge, and I was living, forlornly of course, at my dad’s after being evicted from Banner Street. One day the phone went and an American voice said ‘Hey, it’s Steve Fargnoli, I manage Sinead and she’s given me this song to listen to. She’s going to record it, it’s brilliant’, or words to that effect. I never heard from them again. Dem’s the breaks.

5 or 6 years later I added a middle 8, with a major 7^th in it, and we (me, Brian and Martyn) tried to give it a more laid back dreamy sound. It kind of works, but not as it should.

I no longer get stoned, I sometimes get drunk and I’ve still not been to Rome to see the Pope. Still feel guilty.

If you’d like to listen to it, links to the streaming service of your choice are below. A CD of the album It Just Is, is also available.

https://songwhip.com/steveroberts/go-to-bed