Double Take: 'Hold Back the Night' The Trammps / Graham Parker and the Rumour

Robert Webb on cover versions

The Trammps, best remembered for the once-ubiquitous "Disco Inferno", enjoyed their biggest British success with the Philly groove of "Hold Back the Night" in 1975. Convened three years earlier by the drummer and bass-vocalist Earl Young, the Trammps comprised former members of the Sixties soul strutters The Volcanos and top session players seconded from Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff's Philly International house band. "They were kind of raggedy when I first got them together," Young recalls. "So The Trammps was a pretty appropriate name."

"Hold Back the Night", the group's third dancefloor hit, began life as "Scrub Board", an instrumental B-side. Recut with the soaring vocal talents of Jimmy Ellis, it hustled and bumped its way into the Top 10 and caught the ear of the London-born R&B singer and one-time Mod Graham Parker (right), who was struggling for a hit with some excellent, but commercially unsuccessful, self-penned material.

Parker and his band, the Rumour, talked among themselves. "A few Neanderthal grunts served as pointers and defining moments in the art of solidifying musical arrangements, set lists and hairstyles," he says. "Somehow, in this ethereal stew of non-communication, I must have broached the idea of covering 'Hold Back the Night', and, somehow, the idea must have been accepted."

Parker taped it at Dierks Studio, in Cologne, during a European tour. The Rumour's front man, Brinsley Schwarz, was on sick leave with jaundice; his shoes were filled by Thin Lizzy's harmony-guitarist, Brian Robertson. Their arrangement of "Hold Back the Night", as tight as an Italian three-button suit, appeared on the lurid-coloured-vinyl Pink Parker EP early in 1977. That the original version was still keeping glitter-balls spinning at soul weekenders around the country did not bother Parker. His intention was "merely to fill in the gap between albums in the time-honoured tradition of EPs, like the Stones and The Beatles used to do."

"Hold Back the Night" provided Parker and the Rumour with long-awaited chart success, peaking at No 24. In 1992, the Trammps, far from down and out, lent their vocals to the short-lived Nottingham dance trio KWS (Chris King, Winnie Williams and Delroy St Joseph) for a house version of the song, which shuffled into the lower reaches of the Top 30.