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Tom Petty
Qualifying Songs: American Girl, Into The Great Wide Open, You Don't Know How It Feels
For some reason Tom Petty wasn't as big as he should have been over here in the UK, when he died i had plenty of people saying they knew the name but couldn't name any of his songs.
I saw him on the Old Grey Whistle Test sometime in the early 80s singing 'American Girl' and then he fell off the radar for a few years and although he rarely troubled the UK Charts, he would keep popping up on various music shows in the late 80s and early 90s intermittently much to my delight even if it seemed most British people used his appearance as a chance to go out to the kitchen and put the kettle on.
'American Girl' has a catchy jangling guitar riff and a great guitar solo at the end which dies away far too quickly but only reached number 40 in the UK Charts at the time.
Radio stations tied themselves up in knots over the slower-tempo 'You Don't Know How It Feels' and the line 'let's roll another joint', playing the word 'joint' backwards until Petty recorded another sanitised version with the word 'roll' replaced with 'hit' although why it only made 119 in the UK Charts is less to do with one word being replaced and more to do with cloth-earred DJ's not recognising a brilliant song.
'Into the Great Wide Open' wasn't even released in the UK and it is another slower affair so Tom Petty always remained one of the singers that only the cool kids knew about until he died then everyone said, 'Oh i always liked him, erm, what did he sing again?'
He is all over the radio now that he has died but it's too late because a lot of us were liking him way before the radio stations decided decades too late that he was worthy of some air time.
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