This is Cwmbran born singer Mal Ryder performing on a cherry picker for Italian telly – not enough heavy lifting machinery in music these days.
He was born in the village of Llanfrechfa in 1944 as Paul Bradley Couling; his family moved to Oxford when he was still young. He played in a few bands in the 60’s without finding much success.
But things clicked when he moved his band, The Primitives, over to Italy and after a string of hits became something of a Tom Jones figure – world tours, movies, dating models, sports cars and all that.
He still occasionally performs but devotes most of his time to looking increasingly like Freddie Starr.
The song in the video is from 1967. It’s a cover of an earlier tune by the The Rascals’ called I Ain’t Gonna Eat My Heart Out Anymore. The drummer in The Primitives was a bloke called David ‘Pick’ Withers who would become the original drummer for Dire Straits.
