Late in his career and having lost his wife, his house, and his savings after a series of unlucky choices, John’s been living in a dead man’s London apartment, hoping the bureaucracy isn’t going to catch up with him and leave him homeless.

The song became the title track of the band's second album, I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die, released in November 1967. Nonetheless, the band was considered a forerunner in the emerging music scene in San Francisco, exhibiting one of the more polished debuts, just as its contemporaries were still refining their own sound. Written by Mick Herron —Summer brings with it the sixth novel in Mick Herron’s acclaimed series about the MI6 cast-offs and screw-ups who together make up the personnel of Slough House.

In February 1967, Country Joe and the Fish entered Sierra Sound Laboratories to record their debut album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, with Charters and Denson overseeing the process. In addition, McDonald was a publisher of the left-wing underground magazine Et Tu Brute, which later became Rag Baby, containing poetry, drawings, and political messages. By early 1965, McDonald had become involved in the burgeoning folk scene in Berkeley, and the Free Speech Movement that was organizing demonstrations in University of California, Berkeley, which opposed the war in Vietnam. In this novel, the newcomer is Lech Wicinski, who has been bumped onto the B-team after child pornography was found on his work laptop (as Lamb puts it, ‘He’s already Kevin Spaceyed his career … If he wants to go for the full Rolf Harris he’s a better man than me’).

Sensing the band's potential, Denson assumed management control, and was responsible for coining the group's name—a reference to Josef Stalin and to Mao Zedong's description of revolutionaries as "the fish who swim in the sea of the people". Herron’s brisk narration is in the free indirect style, hopping deftly from one character’s head to another. Herron is, like his characters, somewhat hopeful underneath it all, though, and it’s a quality that makes the Slough House books so enduring. now, and River has also matured (making a choice on the fly, yes–but going to Lamb with it in the way he very much didn’t in Real Tigers and then re-thinking decisions. The EP fulfilled the band's ambitions to incorporate electric instruments into their music, effectively melding the instrumentals and pioneering an early template for the musical subgenre of acid rock.

The previous Slough House novel, 2018’s London Rules, kicks off with an assault-weapon attack on an English village: “The jeep, which had idled throughout the brief carnage, spat stones as it accelerated away. But here, with a member dying and Louisa risking her life to keep some connection with Min, they reach their apotheosis.

Whether it’s Catherine Standish and drinking, River and his family drama, or Roddy losing his one and only (fake) girlfriend, times are darker than normal for the agents left in the purgatory that is Slough House. That Herron explores these decidedly unromantic ideas all while maintaining the genre’s dark poetry is an impressive feat.The Ed Sullivan Show then canceled a previously scheduled appearance by the band, telling them to keep the money they had already been paid in exchange for never playing on the show. But in relaying his suspicions to John Bachelor, who babysits retired spies like Solly for MI5, he sets in motion a train of events that will alter lives. Music historian Richie Unterberger praised "Section 43", saying its "Asiatic guitar, tribal maracas, devious organ, floating harmonica, and ethereal mid-sections of delicate koto-like guitar picking rivaled the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's East West as the finest psychedelic instrumental ever".