This blog kicks off, appropriately, with the B-side of the first single I bought. It cost 45p – my weekly pocket money – from Callers in Ponteland (a furniture shop with a small record department upstairs), soon to be a regular haunt as I made slow sense of displacement from rural Wales to a well-to-do Newcastle satellite. Tonight had been glimpsed on Top of the Pops the previous Thursday (5th January 1978), the Southenders ploughing through their faux-punky, adrenalized ode to a “majorette who used to lead the band”. Hastily styled in modish black suits and black T-shirts with slightly blown-out haircuts (only drummer man Gary Thompson had seen scissors recently), the single’s B-side harked back to singer Chris Turner’s rockier mid-70s roots in Free copyists Hiker. Crisp, clipped chords, froggy backing harmonies and his bluesy turn all work a treat on ‘Stroll On By’, even when it goes a bit Queen at the two-minute mark. A song about rich people’s indifference to the poverty all around them, as relevant now as then, if some of the wordplay’s a little over-drawn (does anyone take caviar by the carton?), the couplet “You play the blind man but it’s just a trick/You catch a tube train but it stinks of sick” was just as evocative of inner city strife as Melle Mel’s “Broken glass everywhere/People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care” on ‘The Message’ three years later. Tonight fizzled out after superior sequel ‘Money (That’s Your Problem)’ stalled at 66, their shelved debut album What About Tonight? surfacing 30 years too late in 2008.