Keen followers of the Mysterious Beings will be aware of the legendary libido of our keyboard ace, all-round cad and unscrupulous bounder, Gene Poole-Skimmings. Given the dubious methods he will employ in his attempts to administer what he likes to call “Gene therapy” to the ladies, it is tempting to think that he is the Eddie of this song. Well, he’s not. It was written many years before I met Gene. And that’s all I’m saying about that.

I happened to be playing around with this song on an old guitar I borrowed from a Filipino crewman on a banana boat the band were taking from Caracas to Miami on the way back from our last South American tour. Banana boats are a cheap way to travel and indeed the only way when the money for your plane tickets home has been mislaid by the above-mentioned Gene Poole-Skimmings in a bordello in Maracaibo. There’s no denying that the days and nights on board pass slowly, however, especially when the crew speaks no language you understand, so we turned to music to bridge the gap. Hearing me strumming that old guitar, Aldo Sachs joined in on sax, followed by the rest of the band and the first mate (that’s him on piano – G P-S was sulking because our Afghan drummer, Kit Bashir, blaming him for his bad case of sea-sickness, had found a new place to store his drumsticks). The captain recorded the performance allowing us to present it here and him to sell bootleg copies from the back of his uncle’s rickshaw in Hanoi.

That bordello in Maracaibo, by the way – Gene Poole-Skimmings still gave it four stars on Trip Advisor.