Songs what I like, episode (whatever)...

Introduced by Pete Murray and Fluff Freeman following at the end on what is obviously the Top of the Pops 1967 christmas or end of year special.

I love this song for so many reasons, not least of which is the use of the Hammond organ, an instrument that is so intrinsically linked with 1960's popular beat combo music until the point at which young long haired "bloody layabouts" (to use my dads vernacular) discovered the Moog Synthasizer.

As soon as I hear the opening bars its the summer of 67 again, its a beach holiday at Cayton Bay, its huge groups of people gathered around a tiny, tinny, portable transistor radio (another new invention) listening to a pirate radio station that may or may not have been moored off the north east coast, its illegal and no-one cares, its 1967, you can do anything in these days and Harold Wilson's government are helpless to stop you, finally caving in to public pressure in September of that year to launch a BBC version of the pirate stations.

But the best memory of this song is the August bank holiday of that year and the Church Fenton air show. I don't know why, for we were no family of geeks, but the Church Fenton air show attracted huge crowds on the bank holiday Monday and our dad took us for several years running - but its the 1967 show that I remember purely for the fact that we had a car full, a Vauxhall Viva car full, and when I hear that song I am crammed against a window in the back of that car queuing for half an hour or so to get into the air show car park, its red hot and "Whiter Shade of Pale" is on the transistor radio that is hanging by its leather strap from the rear view mirror - radios fitted into cars? - whoever heard of such nonsense.