“Gimme Some Lovin’” by the Spencer Davis Group

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One of the catchiest songs of all time, conceived by one of the 20th century’s most mercurial talents.

Here’s a weird, potentially personal question: Do you remember what your greatest accomplishment was when you were 17 years old?

Maybe you were the most popular kid at your high school. Or the most athletic. Or the most artistically inclined. Or the most likely to crush it as a debate team member. I was none of those, which isn’t meant to be self-effacing or modest. I was just a normal teenager who hadn’t necessarily done anything of spectacular note yet. It’s normal. I was only 17.

If you want to talk about impressive accomplishments before hitting the legal drinking age, consider the early career of Steve Winwood. At 14, he became the lead singer and keyboardist for the Spencer Davis Group, alongside his brother Muff, the eponymous Davis on guitar, and Pete York behind the drum kit. By 16, the group had released their first single and, a year later, already had hit singles like “Keep on Running” and “Somebody Help Me” under their belt. But Winwood’s first major songwriting coup came in 1967 with “Gimme Some Lovin’,” which cracked the Top 10 in several countries, including the US, UK, Australia, Ireland, and Canada.

According to those who were in the room at the time, the song came together literally in minutes. Muff Winwood with more:

“We started to mess about with riffs, and it must have been eleven o’clock in the morning. We hadn’t been there half an hour, and this idea just came. We thought, bloody hell, this sounds really good. We fitted it all together and by about twelve o’clock, we had the whole song. Steve had been singing ‘Gimme, gimme some loving’ – you know, just yelling anything, so we decided to call it that. We worked out the middle eight and then went to a cafe that’s still on the corner down the road.**[Manager Chris] Blackwell came to see how we were going on, to find our equipment set up and us not there, and he storms into the cafe, absolutely screaming, ‘How can you do this?’ he screams. Don’t worry, we said. We were all really confident. We took him back, and said, how’s this for half an hour’s work, and we knocked off ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ and he couldn’t believe it. We cut it the following day and everything about it worked. That very night we played a North London club and tried it out on the public. It went down a storm. We knew we had another No. 1.”

At age 17, Steve Winwood was officially the author of a transcendent pop/rock track. Not bad for a baby-faced genius.