Holding the fort in a train station sushi restaurant, keeping an eye on six bike boxes and associated luggage while my travelling companions sourced food for our next leg from Brussels, I was amusing myself by playing wasabi suicide when I heard something drift across from the laptop on the next table.

Straining to listen I had to ask, the two of us strangers now silent, sharing.

It was passion, just pure passion. A tale of woe.

The heartfelt tragedy lyric was there and a with few more amphetamine fuelled bpm’s it would easily qualify for a Wigan Casino B-side legend, destined to be included in endless reissue compilations then sworn by the faceless forum folk adamant that it was one the final three played when ‘they were there’.

Our location made complete sense though. Instead it echoed and drunkenly swayed more towards a De Oude Hoeve Popcorn slowie rather than a class B Northern Soul stomper.

Co-written by her brother Johnny, it oozes their innocent gospel upbringing more than offerings of that time found on the Philles Records Wall of Sound or indeed the awesome teenage angst punk rock fundamentals of The Shangri-La’s.

Booker T. Jones of Greens Onions fame kicks it off, Stax sessioning for new signings The Drapels. Their lead singer, Mary Frierson, renamed Wendy Rene by Otis Redding, ditched her brother and the rest of the group for the release of the single in August 1964; it peaked nowhere.

Her second offering, ‘Bar-B-Q’, sounding nothing like the first, followed a similar course. Stepping back she settled for session work, married again and as a new mother she chose last minute not to board a flight to travel to her scheduled last show. The plane never made it, the 26-year old Redding and six others killed as it plunged into a frigid Lake Montana.

After Laughter (Comes Tears).

Her haunting vocal competing with the station hubbub, the well-dressed older gent beside me offering as it ended; ‘it’s an old song, I stumbled across it somehow’.

The Wu-Tang Clan stumbled across it too, sampling the Booker T. riff and Rene’s chorus for the B-side of their first single, ‘Protect Ya Neck’; the track later included as ‘Tearz’ on their blueprint ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’ album. The Wu-Tang version also telling a tale of woe, not of 60’s Memphis, but of 90’s Staten Island.