16 October 1964
Calling yourselves Herman’s Hermits is a clear sign your core brand value is English whimsy. Sure enough, the following year these guys will surf the British Invasion by playing the stage Englishman for ravenous US audiences with the George Formby-esque ‘Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter’ and then ‘I’m Henry VIII, I Am’, an actual music-hall number.
It’s something of a surprise to me, then, to learn that ‘I’m Into Something Good’ is a cover of a lesser-known track from those sophisticates of US East Coast pop, Goffin and King in the Brill Building. That said, there’s probably a reason it was lesser-known in the first place: there’s no hidden depth of teen heartache or doubt for classy ’60s girl groups like The Shirelles or The Shangri-Las to mine for dramatic oomph. There’s no depth to it at all: just that happy-go-lucky bounce which wears me down after the first chorus. Its subsequent use on a priceless montage sequence in The Naked Gun captures the limits of its rictus-grinning tweeness and ad-jingle inanity to perfection.
