I’d simply suggest that you click on the link below and get doing the same…Īctually, one thing that’s worth noting here is how long this, and so many other records, have spent at the top this year. It gets you tapping your feet, and shaking your shoulders, rather than working your brain. If this record were a person, it’d be a doer, not a thinker. Really though – it’s not the sort of song that needs much writing about. I do love this song, but am struggling to write much more about it. Edmunds himself just recently retired from touring in his mid-seventies. ‘I Hear You Knocking’ was first recorded in the mid-fifties, by Smiley Lewis (Edmunds also shouts his name out during the solo) and then Fats Domino. It’s a staple of 70s Compilations, which is probably where first I heard it as a kid. He had had one UK Top 10 with his blues band Love Sculpture, and this was his first, and by far his biggest, solo hit. Dung! Next verse!ĭespite ‘I Hear You Knocking’ sounding like it just crawled out of a Louisiana swamp, Dave Edmunds is actually Welsh. (Over the chorus, Edmunds starts shouting out the names of some fifties rock ‘n’ roll stars – Chuck Berry! Fats Domino! – to leave us in no doubt about to whom this song owes a debt.) Something that sounds like a steam train gets added to the insistent rhythm, and then we get the piece de resistance of the whole record: the single, clanging note from a honky-tonk piano. Our second whiff of glam at the top of the charts – after ‘Spirit in the Sky’ – and a bit of a throwback. Careless lyrics aside, this is a rocking record. Though he later reveals that this all happened in ’52, when he told her that I would never go with you… Which is both contradictory to what he sang two verses earlier, and a hell of a long time to hold a grudge… I hear you knockin’, But you can’t come in… Go back where you been! She left him, though he begged her not to, and Edmunds still isn’t over it.
It’s a sassy song – the singer telling his ex to get the hell out with their sweet words. You went away and left me, Long time ago, And now you’re knockin’, On my door… And I love the fact that at heart it’s just a straight-up, chugging, no frills rock ‘n’ roll number. The trippy effects in the background, too, that sound like weird sea-creatures calling to one another across the deep. I love the choppy guitar, and the fried vocals. I Hear You Knocking, by Dave Edmunds (his 1 st and only #1)Ħ weeks, from 22 nd November 1970 – 3 rd January 1971 It’s one of my earliest memories of popular music, this song – so early that I have no idea how it got to be there, buried in my consciousness.
And so we arrive at a song I know very well – a song I’ve loved for a long time.
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