Them – Here Comes the Night

He wrote it, produced it for them, then cut it with somebody else and released that version first.

Billy Harrison was sitting in a studio in West Hampstead when Bert Berns told him he had a song and had written the riff and nothing else. There were no engineers in the room. The two of them worked out the rest of it there, sitting in Decca’s studio, and by Harrison’s account what they built that afternoon is what ended up on the record. Van Morrison was nineteen years old.

Keep watching: Janis Joplin – Piece of My Heart

Berns is a name most people do not know and should. He wrote Twist and Shout, Hang On Sloopy, Piece of My Heart and Tell Him. He produced Under the Boardwalk for the Drifters. Within two years of this session he would sign Morrison to Bang Records and produce Brown Eyed Girl, and within three he would be dead of a heart attack at thirty-eight. He was, by most accounts, a difficult man to work with and an extraordinarily good one to have on your record.

Them cut Here Comes the Night at Decca Studios in October 1964, in the same session that produced Baby, Please Don’t Go and the B-side. They assumed it would be their next single. It was the first Berns composition they had recorded and everyone in the room knew what they had.

Beaten to it by the man who wrote it

What happened next is unusual even by the standards of 1960s record labels. Berns took the same song into the studio with Lulu, another Decca artist, and Decca rushed her version out as a single in November 1964 — four months before Them’s. It reached No.50 in Britain and did not chart in America at all.

Them’s version finally appeared on March 5, 1965. It went to No.2 in the UK, No.8 in Canada and No.24 in the United States, and it remains the biggest thing the band ever did. Depending on which source you use it finished either 33rd or 36th among the best-selling British singles of the entire year. Berns had competed against his own production, on his own label, with his own song, and lost by forty-eight places.

Who is actually playing

There is one thing worth knowing before watching any footage of Them performing this, including the 1965 clip on this page. The hit record was not made by the band alone. Session musicians were brought into the Decca sessions, and the guitar on this arrangement is Jimmy Page — three years before Led Zeppelin, working as one of the most in-demand session players in London.

That was standard practice and Them were not unusual in it, but it means the live performances of this song are a genuinely different thing from the record. What you hear on the single is a Northern Irish R&B band, a Brill Building songwriter from New York, and a session guitarist from Heston, none of whom had much in common beyond being in the same building.

Morrison wrote One More Time immediately afterward, off the back of finally having a Top 10 hit. Them fell apart within two years and he went solo, first with Berns at Bang and then a long way past him. The nineteen-year-old on this recording sounds like somebody imitating a man twice his age, which is roughly what he was doing, and it is the reason the record still works.