Out in the suburbs you can watch grass grow.

I’ve been away for a few days, to Whitby, a place I’ve never visited before, so I’ve neglected the top ten Steve songs Spotify specifies as super. Whitby is singularly scintillating. I promise to rein in the alliteration.

At number 3 is… Holy Moses. This song is on the Viper Label’s compilation,  The Great Liverpool Acoustic Experiment.

I’m pretty surprised this is quite popular and can only conclude that it’s proximity to other bands on the album, like Space and The Christians, has got it noticed. Or people think it’s Border Song by Elton John.

I have very little memory of recording the song, but I know Martyn C played the bass and he and Lizzie Nunnery are on backing vocals. What I can remember is that my cheap computer found it difficult to process and it was almost impossible to keep everything in time. Kids today with their Gazillions of Gigabytes – sorry – don’t know they’re born.

The song began as a weird idea to write a completely fictional account of the lives of members of the band the Buffalo Springfield, after the band had split up. For what it’s worth, I have no clue why and I wrote no more about them after this.

So this song is Richie Furay’s song. I pictured him bitter and twisted after the band’s demise and his pioneering but largely unrewarding, chart wise at least, music with country rock band Poco. We find him out in the suburbs with his new wife, a malfunctioning swimming pool and receding hair. All of it most probably untrue.

Richie became a pastor for 25 years in Colorado retiring in 2017s and has reunited with both the Buffalo Springfield and Poco subsequently. I wish I’d had half Richie’s impact on popular music. I think I was very unfair to him and I apologise for the gross use of artistic license. It doesn’t do to fact check pop songs, is my defence, and his recent support for Trump.

Listening to the song today, it has a lo-fi shambolic charm but there’s a terrible drop in that screams ‘recorded at a different time’  to my ears. If you’d like to listen to this historically inaccurate song, you can do so by clicking the link below and choosing the streaming service of your choice.

https://songwhip.com/steveroberts/holy-moses