Dear James,
You'll remember many years ago when we were young I made the crass error of living in Brussels for five months. I didn't have any music while there, so when I wasn't pretending to read Jean-Paul Sartre I listened to Belgian radio, particularly an evening radio show called "Le Vieil Méchin", which I think means "The Old Devil" but may actually mean "The Vile Messin". Most of what they played was old tat from the 60s and 70s, with a particular fondness for this Tremeloes hit, number one for 3 weeks in May 1967. I like to think that my over-posting of songs from the 60s and 70s can be traced back to Le Vieil Méchin, but the same station had Baader Meinhof's Mogadishu on daily rotation, so I'm probably just making excuses.
The song was written by Bob Gaudio, one of the Four Seasons (I think he was Autumn) and producer Bob Crewe, who as producer of the Four Seasons was probably nicknamed Vivaldi. Or God. They were responsible for similarly ridiculous falsetto on "Big Girls Don't Cry", wrote the Walker Brothers' "The Sun Ain't Gonna Cry Anymore" and also wrote one of my favourite wedding songs ever, "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You".
Sadly for Frankie Valli, that song is best known for Andy Williams' rendition, meaning that the song most people associate with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons is the comparatively rubbish "Oh What A Night". It turns out that old Frankie gets around more than the clap: it was his Beggín that those advertising people sampled to sell gym slips, he sang lead vocals on the theme from Grease and also released a somewhat jaunty version of The Beatles' "A Day in the Life" for the 1976 "ephemeral documentary", All This and World War II . More of which later. Or earlier, if you're reading this blog from top to bottom in traditional style.
And another thing: do you know how Bob Gaudio and Frankie Valli met? Joe Pesci introduced them.
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