From the recording Hey Little Girl

We next recorded a ballad I had written some months ago, inspired by an idea I got when I was at Bobby Boulter's place. The song was called Hey Little Girl. As before, we had Vesa Enne, Kaj Lind and Irina Milan on backing vocals. These guys really knew how to sing - still, they had been doing it a long time, ever since the 1950-60s, and had appeared on just about every professional recording ever made in Finland, from rock & roll to Eurovision pop songs. In fact, the whole band was impressive, every one of the musicians pretty much lived in the studio, a 10-hour a day, every day of the year. There wasn't anything that you could tell these guys about studio recording, or playing rock & roll for that matter.

Long before Michael Jackson was sponsored by Pepsi, Coca Cola released a cassette featuring my composition, Hey Little Girl. The Finnish Co-Operative Bank also produced a cassette featuring my music. The cassette was entitled ‘NOPROCK’ and went on to sell in excess of 100,000 copies.

 With Brian Poole fronting, Chris Black on guitar, and a drummer, bass player and a sax from Gary Glitter’s band, and with me on backing vocals and piano, we toured the UK. Brian came round to my flat in Greenwich one day, we had a few beers and were listening to some of my songs, when he suddenly blurted out, "Hey, I wanna record this song!" I had Hey Little Girl playing in the background. He loved that song and so, a couple of weeks later, he went into the studio with the Glitter band, and it was released on Chris Black's record label. I never received a penny in royalties from that! Still, after a time, Brian had had enough of touring, and went back to his butcher's shop. Strangely enough though, his recording of Hey Little Girl found its way onto a major label and is now on several ‘best of the sixties’ compilations. One Saturday morning I was listening to Sounds of the Sixties on BBC Radio 2, presented by Brian Matthews, when he announced “…And here is an old favourite recorded in the sixties from Brian Poole - Hey Little Girl! I was rather surprised, not least because I didn't write that song until 1977! Anyway, at least I started getting royalties for that song from then on.