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I always thought they were brothers.

Dave & Ansil Collins? Well, I imagine most people thought the same. But no, Dave and Ansil didn’t actually meet until the recording of this track. Ansil Collins was a keyboard player but for this record, producer Winston Riley brought in Dave Barker to do a lot of largely improvised shouting over the riff and rhythm. It should have been terrible but it’s fantastic – one of my favourite records of all time, for reasons I can’t really explain. I wasn’t alone. Double Barrel went straight to No.1 in 1971, so Barker and Collins met up a few months later to record the follow-up hit “Monkey Spanner”, then went their separate ways. So not only were they not related, they hardly knew each other. Whatever next? You’ll be telling me that the Righteous Brothers and the Doobie Brothers aren’t brothers either.

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