And the prize for the most obvious blog post anywhere today goes to me.

Yes, it’s been hot. A real rarity, my solar shower has been out and actually worked. The shorts have been on, even for a visit to the shops and the factor 50+ sunscreen has been applied all over to my very pale Celtic skin. My diet has mostly consisted of rum and raisin ice cream.

Unlike most summer related songs, Summer in the City isn’t a paean to the intense daytime heat (which you might’ve guessed I generally find hellish), with ‘All around, people looking half dead’. Instead the song enthuses about the relative cool of the evening. ‘At night it’s a different world,’ John Sebastian sings, ‘Go out and find a girl / Come-on come-on and dance all night / Despite the heat it’ll be alright.’

The Lovin’ Spoonful even in their mid ’60s heyday were often inconsistent. They could be sublime (Darling Be Home Soon), they could be irritating (Daydream, Nashville Cats) and with Summer in the City, they could produce perfect pop, or as they liked to it ‘good time music’.

Donovan visited the studio as Sebastian added his vocal to the song and I wonder how he thought his next single Sunshine Superman would compare in the popularity stakes, he would surely have realised he had some very serious competition if. In the middle of August 1966, Summer in the City replaced The Troggs’ Wild Thing as America’s number one single and stayed there for three weeks, before Donovan briefly replaced them at the top. Greenwich Village 3 Maryhill 1. Sounds about fair.

Summer in the City was one of the first hit singles to use found sound, which likely explains why John Sebastian finds miming it so amusing here, the pneumatic drill and car horn honks only drawing attention to the pretence that the band were supposedly performing the song live.

Fast forward a few years and, as the hits began running out, the band was witnessing a distinct lack of lovin’ within its ranks, with most of the friction coming between Sebastian and drummer and occasional vocalist Joe Butler.

‘John clearly did not respect Joe’s musical contributions or his abilities as a player, and wasn’t making much of an effort to disguise it,’ Steve Boone noted in his 2014 book My Life on the Run. ‘Joe thought John was pretentious, had a false sense of superiority and claimed too much credit for the success of the group.’

This maybe explains why when Sebastian left to embark on a solo career, Butler was keen to continue on, trading under the Lovin’ Spoonful moniker. If they could somehow turn around the bands’ fortunes, then he would have one up on his rival.

By the Autumn of 1968, they were operating as a trio: Joe Butler on drums, lead and backing vocals; Steve Boone on bass and Jerry Yester playing guitar and keyboards and supplying some vocals. A single called (Till I) Run With You was released in America but flopped so badly that the album which was also to be called (Till I) Run With You was renamed Revelation: Revolution ’69.

Billed as The Lovin’ Spoonful Featuring Joe Butler, the album is inconsistent with an unhealthy smattering of duds, the worst offender being the seven minutes long War Games, a collage of dialogue from film clips intended as a protest against the Vietnam War. Did it change a single person’s opinions on the carnage they’d been seeing on their TV screens every night? I doubt it. Maybe some stoned hippies found it ‘far out’ but it’s so abysmal that I couldn’t listen past the halfway mark.

So, the album is not recommended but I have grown fond of (Till I) Run With You, which has just made an appearance on the soundtrack of The Resort, a mystery thriller set in Mexico, that just started streaming in Britain last month. I doubt I’ll be tempted to tune in but the first episode at least has a couple of other imaginatively chosen tracks on its soundtrack in addition to the Spoonful: namely David Byrne and Brian Eno’s collaboration Strange Overtones and Bridget St John’s Song to Keep You Company, taken from a 1969 session for John Peel’s Top Gear show on Radio 1. Has any other Peel session track been used for a TV drama? I can’t think of any.

(Till I) Run With You might not be regarded as a Lovin’ Spoonful classic and it’s never going to receive the renewed attention and chart success that Kate Bush enjoyed with Running Up That Hill due to its use on Stranger Things but it does grow on you and Joe Butler carries out his vocal duties impressively. There’s also a sumptuous bass line and some lovely harmonies. Enjoy:

Time to experience a summer night in the city myself now, though I think the shorts will have to be ditched and the chances of me dancing all night are about the same as changing my mind about War Games, and declaring it an avant-garde political masterpiece.