We dive in the deep end this month with a little piece of magic which went to Number 11 in the US in 1964, and won the first of three Grammy Awards for the woman who sang it.

We’re talking about Nancy Wilson’s wonderful (You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am which SMA has taken up for a baby milk campaign.

Sadly the commercial fades before the chorus and so today’s viewers will miss a peerless performance of what must be one of early Soul music’s most criminally overlooked hooks. Why it failed to make the UK charts back in the day, or indeed never grabbed the attention of those British bands like The Moody Blues or The Swingin’ Blue Jeans who were busy hoovering up US R’n’B smashes wherever they could – think Bessie Banks’ Go Now or Betty Everett’s You’re No Good – is anybody’s guess.

Indeed the only time How Glad… tickled our Top 40 was when Kiki Dee fuc..sorry funked it up as the follow up to I’ve Got The Music In Me in 1975. But we won’t waste time on that. Not when the sublimely simple original has us a-slobberin’ and a-slaverin’ all over the sofa!

Nicknamed Fancy Miss Nancy and The Girl With The Honeycoated Voice, Wilson was already a star of the New York night club scene, with a handful of hits and as many Capitol albums to her credit – including one recorded in 1962 with legendary jazz saxophonist Cannonball Adderley – when How Glad I Am came along.

Not only did it prove to be the most successful of the 11 Billboard chart entries she enjoyed between 1963 and 1971 but it catapulted her to TV stardom too. Danny Kaye and Sammy Davis Jnr were among the first to recognise her formidable talents as an all round entertainer and in 1967 Nancy Wilson broke new ground for a black woman when NBC gave her a series of her own.

And she certainly didn’t stop there. Her career as a much applauded and awarded actor, singer and political activist continued all the way up to her retirement in 2011 at the age of 74.

Of course, Nancy Wilson is not the only great girl singer to have graced the commercial breaks over the last few weeks. Dusty Springfield has made a welcome appearance courtesy of on-line poker site 32Red Casino which has licensed the version of the Classics IV’s Spooky she cut in 1970 as the B side of How Can I Be Sure?

But it’s Annabella Lwin, the 14 year old schoolgirl who fronted Malcolm McClaren’s controversial Bow Wow Wow, who grabs our attention next. In today’s post-Jimmy Saville climate Malcolm the Manipulator would never get away with the unashamedly (underage) sexy image he built around Lwin and the band. But this was the New Romantic early 1980s when anything went.

The cover of Bow Wow Wow’s debut album – a spoof of Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe by French impressionist painter Manet in which an apparently naked Lwin sits surrounded by her fully-clothed bandmates – said as much as those suggestive songs like Sexy Eiffel Tower and Go Wild In The Country.

But underneath all the fuss and furore Bow Wow Wow were an exciting post punk rock band and the mix of their trademark Burundi drums and Bo Diddley’s famous backbeat on I Want Candy, which you can hear powering PayPal’s current screen campaign, handed them a Top 10 hit in 1982.

Garageband fans will know that the song was originally recorded in 1965 by The Strangeloves, a fictional band led by Brill Building songwriter Richard Gottherer who would later go on to produce CBGBs luminaries Richard Hell & The Voidoids and, of course, Blondie.

According to the press handout The Strangeloves were three Australian brothers called Giles, Miles and Niles Strange!?! Clearly US pop fans swallowed this line as completely as they did claims that the Sir Douglas Quintet and The Turtles came from England, because I Want Candy made into the Top Ten across the Atlantic while a cover by Brian Poole and The Tremeloes was equally successful here. A subsequent Strangeloves’ hit Night Time also made it onto Lenny Kaye’s hugely influential Nuggets collection, thereby securing the fake band’s proto-punk credentials forever.

If Gottherer never ran into Burt Bacharach and Hal David during their mutual Brill Building days then he would still have heard the original hit version of Sandie Shaw’s breakthrough 1964 hit There’s Always Something There To Remind Me – which, quite coincidentally, helps set the tone of a big budget, retrotastic Peroni beer ad currently showing at a cinema near you.

This was not a Dionne Warwick release as you might expect but by one Lou Johnson who took it to into the Top 50 stateside earlier that same year. Although he consistently nibbled at the bottom end of the charts during the 1960s with other Bacharach and David titles like Message To Martha and Walk On By – and even visited the UK to appear on ITV’s Ready Steady Go! – Brooklyn-born singer and pianist Johnson never quite achieved the breakthrough he deserved.

By 1971 he was signed to Stax Records who sent him down to New Orleans to record with legendary writer producer Allen Toussaint on an album called With You In Mind. Sadly it proved to be Johnson’s last throw of the dice and sank without trace. Which is where his story might end were it not for De La Soul’s 1991 floorfiller Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey) which sampled the swampy down home guitar lick from side one track five The Beat and led to a slow but sure re-evaluation of Johnson and his work.

So we should thank those ad agency creatives at Southern Comfort who, not content with re-acquainting us with Odetta earlier this year (see RC No 410), have stripped the spoken intro to The Beat, plus the guitar lick of course, onto a single take film in which a man sits in a barber’s shop and has his hair washed.

No, we don’t get it either but we just lurrve the music.