Can you turn it up, Dad? Bit more. Little bit more. Just a tiddly bit more. We can nearly hear it in the back. This was the course of in-car conversation whenever Mink DeVille's Spanish Stroll came over the AM airwaves in the long hot summer of 77. It would start one femtosecond after the opening upstroked guitar chord, and continue over the one-note solo intro, and generally into the backing vocals' Ooo-ooo oo-oo-oo. Then we could sit back in the plush velour of the family bottle green Hillman Hunter 1600 and enjoy the rest of the record as it whispered from the single speaker somewhere under the dashboard. Spanish Stroll was a thing of strangeness and beauty. We could hardly decipher any of the lyrics of course: is Brother Johnny a raisin in the wind? What was all that stuff with the paper boat? Now he's speaking foreign - it must be Spanish. What is a Spanish Stroll anyway? It's got to be more than just a slow Iberian amble. Does this count as punk? Half of it does, with its distorted guitar, basic chord progression, and one-note solos, but Spanish guitars and backing singers aren't very punky. And does Mink DeVille have any connection with Cruella de Vil and her love for furs? There are always more questions than answers...
Someone looked after their Hillman Hunter better than we did
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