On Underfoot, "Friend o' Mine" was not the second song. It was the last track on side two. Spindle holes are not always punched exactly on centre, and there was often some warp as well. The song generally came with a bit of wow, sonically speaking. Now it has a better kind of wow, I hope.
I wrote in the last post that "Underfoot" was not among the songs we had recorded as pre-production. Looking through my stuff, I realized that all of the songs we recorded for the EP were newer than the ones we had thought we were going to record. And the newer songs were better.
This was not, however, the first version of "Friend o' Mine" that we released. We had recorded it earlier at the same studio for the third Throbbing Lobster compilation, Claws!!! (I think that's all the exclamation points). I'm not sure why we recorded it again. I think it was because the way we did it the first time was okay, but a bit thin, the weakest of our three compilation songs, at least production-wise. But I liked the song and thought it deserved better.
It was a bit of a roman à clef, dramatized, as songs often are, about a very close friendship that went very bad (but then good again). In typical stripped-down fashion, it has no chorus, only a refrain at the end of each verse, a B part that happens twice, and then the refrain repeated at the end. Is that B part a bridge? Can a middle eight happen twice? The organ was a Vox Continental, on which the "white" keys were black and the "black" keys were white. People usually thought it was a Farfisa, which had a similar but not identical reedy sound.
The o-apostrophe in the title was a dumb inside joke. The original title was "Friend o' Mine (Plate o' Shrimp)," the "Plate o' Shrimp" being a reference to the movie Repo Man, which to this day is still one of our favourites to rewatch.
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