I always found the films arrangement of this very curious. You’ve got the lyrics by Burns celebrating his latest conquest, set to a very folky guitar arrangement but then the vocal delivery is incredibly saccharine (though beautifully sung, to be fair) for the topic.
I felt my mission required me to find an expert guitar plucker who could deliver a more restrained vocal. I gave this one a lot of thought and racked the brain cells thoroughly for days. As usual, it came by accident, I was looking for a CD to put on and saw my copy of “Baroque Primitiva” on the shelf and it hit me like a punch on the nose.
I knew he was a fan of the film as he’d done a wonderful version of “Gently Johnny” and that iconoclastic touch he’s had all his career meant there was no way it would end up saccharine. Like most folks, I was first exposed to Al’s talents with his classic group Sun City Girls. If you never heard them, you never lived.
Anyway, this new version by Alvarius B does exactly what the song needed. Recorded in a Cairo studio, its got a much more small room intimacy to it that the original lacked and a much more appropriate vocal to Burns’ words. This is how I always wanted it to sound
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