One Friday, in October 2006, I was skimming the music pages of The Guardian. I was already ‘old’ by then and had never been cool, so it felt like a form of tourism. But then I came across a column entitled ‘Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll!”. It was a piece about a song, well-written. Better still, the song in question was old, wonderful and ever-so-slightly odd. It celebrated youth and freedom on a solo night drive in “Massachusetts when it’s late at night,” on a long and, on the face of it, unglamorous ring road: Route 128. The song was ‘Roadrunner’ by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, and the columnist was Laura Barton.

The next year, Laura followed this up with a personal account of her pilgrimage to Route 128. And now, appropriately, we have the radio version, Roadrunner, going out on Radio 4 this Sunday at 7.45 p.m.

Better you should read Laura’s articles than have me paraphrase them here  (click on the links above). Equally, I don’t want to give away too much about the radio story because I hope you’ll listen. All I’ll say is that it gives voice to the Road, Route 128, itself: “I was built to inspire a song. A love song for a road, for a car, for music and the modern world. A song about about going faster miles an hour. With the radio on.”

Seven Types Of Roadrunner

However, there is nothing to stop you listening to the song immediately. There are a number of versions of ‘Roadrunner’, many of them by Jonathan Richman himself. Here are just seven.

The first, by the original Modern Lovers lineup, was recorded in 1972 and produced by John Cale of the Velvet Underground, but wasn’t released until four years later. It’s not my favourite, but it rocks hard and there’s a keyboard solo by (I’m guessing) Jerry Harrison, later of Talking Heads. This is probably the most accessible version for someone new to the song.

The stripped down ‘Roadrunner (Once)’ by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers was a UK hit in the summer of 1977.  I prefer it, partly because it allows more of Richman’s quirkiness to come through but mostly because it allows me some nostalgia. Fourteen and introverted, I would sit at the top of the house of an evening “with the radio on, for company.” Radio Luxembourg (208) on a small tranny, to be precise. Now and then, Donna Summer feeling love, or Fleetwood Mac dreaming or The Brotherhood of Man (ahem) doing whatever with Angelo would be interrupted by something more interesting. The Stranglers. The Sex Pistols. And also this guy playing a song – mostly on two chords – about going faster miles an hour. He sang quietly about how exciting it was at night with the pine trees in the dark and how cold it was. The woo and whee of imperfect MW reception filled the gaps in the sound and seemed to punctuate the phrases with question marks.

‘Roadrunner’ is very easy to play and very difficult to capture. To my mind, no cover has managed it. The Sex Pistols’ version is a non-starter, mostly because Sid Vicious doesn’t know the words, but it does convey the simple hypnotic pleasure of bashing out the same chords over and over again. Joan Jett’s is too processed for my taste and sounds like PA music at a gig before the support band come on. Greg Kihn finds some of the “spirit of old 1956” but little of the song’s strangeness. From that point of view, Yo La Tengo’s version may be closest in spirit to the original.

You’re better off staying with Jonathan Richman. Laura writes at length about ‘Roadrunner (Thrice)’. And it’s a joy. Because of its length (over eight minutes) the drive turns into an epic journey. There is a sense of space, of time passing, and the extended soliloquy on being alone makes you wonder if there’s just a hint of whistling in the dark beneath the apparent joie de vivre. History doesn’t relate whether William Empson had views on ‘Roadrunner’ – and I apologise for using the ‘Seven Types’ so frivolously – but I think he might have found some ambiguities here.

“We’re gonna drive them home, you guys.”

And so back to the Road. It’s a lot to expect of an actor to characterise 58 miles of tarmac, but John Schwab‘s reading is assured and lived-in, and captures both the spirit and the rhythms of Laura’s writing. If Route 128 could really speak, it would sound like John.

I hope you enjoy it.

“Bye bye.”