14 February 1964
Here’s our first Irish number one single written by someone called Bono – Sonny Bono, along with wall-of-sound and Wrecking Crew associate Jack Nitzsche and the song’s original singer, Jackie DeShannon. Sonny will soon also team up with the redoubtable Cher, and all those names will be rubbing elbows with the vanguard of ’60s US west coast pop. Not every Bono is so blessed with the calibre of their collaborators.
More prosaic than the L.A. scene is the Merseybeat parish, whence we get this one-note, one-gear cover by Liverpool four-piece guitar band Kinda Sorta Like If Your Ears Could Squint The Beatles. The uncomfortable key change does no favours to band nor listener. Still, the source material being fundamentally sound—and smart enough to depict the narrator’s misogyny as an outlash of insecure hurt—all The Searchers need to do here is keep it between the ditches, so it’s agreeable. That’s not something you can say about every record involving a Bono.
Irish Number Ones 