You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.
If you’re going to be a one-hit wonder, you might as well do it with a song that’s as hard to dislike – and as woven into rock’s DNA – as Hang On Sloopy. Its co-writer Bert Berns also half-wrote Twist And Shout, so he couldn’t have done more to pinpoint rock’n’roll’s primitive shapes unless he’d written Louie Louie too. Sloopy’s other co-author, Wes Farrell, went on to mastermind the music for the Partridge Family.
The McCoys, for their part, may have had moptops and Beatle suits, but they didn’t have a David Cassidy (or a Davy Jones), and their follow-ups to the runaway success of Sloopy soon ran out of steam. One listen here to their lacklustre, insipid versions of such can’t-go-wrong standards as Fever and Sorrow shows you why. Still, they’ll always have Sloopy, the 1965 chart-topper which offers a pop textbook in how to build and tease the excitement of release.
Later, as this patchy but intriguing collection shows, The McCoys went a little bit garagepsych. By the end of the 60s their singer-guitarist was playing with Johnny and Edgar Winter. In the new decade he started his next life as Rick Derringer.
