James Taylor - You Got a Friend

The first time I saw colour television in all its glory was when I went round to another boy's house, whose father owned local supermarkets and whose mother was much more like Polly Brown from Pickettywitch or Lulu than one's contemporary's mothers were supposed to be. We had colour in our house in due course and the first memorable comment on it I remember was my grandfather's, who said it must be much better for the horse racing.

James Taylor was on Top of the Pops when I first saw the difference that colour made. His guitar was orange, the background profoundly deep blue. James Taylor was a week or two into the four weeks he had at number one in my own, personal chart that I compiled as a matter of priority every Tuesday when I got home from school, that it turned out my best friend had also been privately doing and, eventually, everybody else did, too.

James Taylor, then, seemed entirely 'the business', the lank-haired, sensitive minstrel poet capable of expressing all the need for love we thought we felt alongside the possibility of warmth, the habitual loner who nonetheless had the opportunity of being brought inside.

I knew You Got a Friend word for word then, proved I still did more than once many years later and could probably still do it now. But it took a while to realize how little of the credit for it was due to James, who was very 'mainstream', almost offensively 'easy listening' when all the credit was due to Carole King, who it looks like might be playing piano unobtrusively on this, who was, more than likely amongst others, one of James's several celebrity girlfriends while his studied act of being serious and sensitive passed as art.

Best of luck to the boy but the dreary role of singer-songwriter, of which there were plenty then, doesn't look quite so meaningful or impressive now and definitely not when it turns out you never even wrote your own greatest hit.