Hurry, don’t be late

Little River Band were six Australians playing immaculate American soft rock, and in 1978 they out-Americaned everyone with “Reminiscing” — a song about a forties courtship, written thirty years too late for a decade that badly wanted to slow-dance.

The nostalgia is borrowed, and that’s the charm. Guitarist Graeham Goble reaches back to a bandstand America he never saw — Glenn Miller on the radio, a Friday-night walk home — and Glenn Shorrock sings it like a man leafing through someone else’s photo album and missing every moment in it anyway. The chords are supper-club jazz smuggled onto AM radio; the harmonies pure late-seventies gloss. John Lennon reportedly counted it among his favourite songs of the era, which feels right: this is craftsmanship you notice most when you stop listening for it.

Hurry, don’t be late.