Manfred Mann – The Greatest Hits And Moreīlinded By The Light: Life as a hit record.

The stories behind the songs: The Ghost Of Tom Joad by Bruce Springsteen.

'Manfred blames the azimuth on the tape machine, and does a convincing Alan Partridge impression as he wraps his facial muscles around the words ‘deuce’, ‘douche’ and ‘dooce’ – which is what they finally managed to get it back to after more fiddling about with the tape. Worse still, that line sounded more like ‘Wrapped up like a douche.’ But he hadn’t checked the lyrics, and somehow ‘ Cut loose like a deuce’ became ‘ Wrapped up like a deuce’. “I find that if you keep referring back you can get over-familiar with it and start to think it’s better than your lousy version,” he says with dry irony. Once Manfred had learned Springsteen’s original, he hadn’t listened to it. “Suddenly I had the American record label on the phone saying: ‘We can’t get radio stations in the southern bible belt to play the record because everyone thinks you’re singing about a vaginal douche’.” In America the single did even better, climbing slowly but surely to No.1 despite – or maybe because of – some controversy over the meaning of the lyrics. reviving Manfred’s fortunes which had been in the doldrums after he’d disbanded the Manfred Mann pop group in favour of his wilfully uncommercial Chapter Three. In the UK Blinded By The Light got to No.6 in the autumn of 1976. This was in the days when you had to try and lock two tape machines in tandem, so that took another two days.” So we recorded those as backing vocals and added that to the original. But he kept insisting, and I kept saying no, until I suddenly realised that he wasn’t hearing Chopsticks itself, just the chords, which fitted perfectly. 'We already had that elsewhere in the song, and I told him it wouldn’t work. And then – and this is why you need to be in a band – our drummer Chris Slade said: ‘Play Chopsticks over it’. I just couldn’t figure out a way to do it. The way we did it on the album wouldn’t work. The real problem was how to get from the chorus to the verse smoothly. “When we finally finished the album track I thought it had a great vibe, but the next question was how to get that into a single. I knew there was some magic in it, particularly at the end with the two voices singing the verse and chorus together. “I spent ages fiddling with it, and eventually realised that if we cut out the stopping and starting at the end of every verse then we could get somewhere.

“The original version – which didn’t get on to the album – was very long and elaborate, quite different to what you hear now,” he says.

Blinded by the light album