DUNCAN BROWNE

This is Duncan Browne’s ‘My Old Friends’, which I heard on a repeat of Guy Garvey’s BBC Radio 6 Music programme Guy Garvey's Finest Hour from a Sunday in June:



I’d never heard of Duncan Browne, though I should have done. As you can see from the hair, this was done in 1973. It starts unpromisingly, and he's singing entirely about male camaraderie - the friendships made before “we met our women and they took us away" - but there's a cluster of fresh and lovely lines in the middle. And it's in interesting contrast to that other song about old friends, 'Bob Dylan's Dream'.

Duncan Browne died of cancer in 1993, aged 46.