Valerie was a gift from God ...Amy took it to a new level

IT WOULDN’T be hard to turn Dave McCabe's life into a misery memoir — expelled from school, guilty of assault, years wasted on drink and drugs... But marriage and fatherhood gave The Zutons frontman the motivation to beat the bottle.

- 

Finding love and having son Louie were “the best things that ever happened to me,” admits Dave, who married Paula just over a year ago.

“If it wasn’t for this woman I'd be a lot worse off — maybe not even here.”

His unbridled joy informed the Liverpool band’s last album — 2024’sThe Big Decider — which exploded with renewed zest and lust for life. “It still speaks to the people but with optimism,” he tells me. “It’s good to get away from reality — we're not the Sleaford Mods.”

Born in Knowsley, Merseyside, the son of a plasterer and supermarket worker, the 44-year-old is honest about his flaws.

“I'm a narky bastard,” he confesses. “And certain people know how to push your buttons.

“They see you doing better than they are, or having a strong opinion, putting your arse on the line when you write a song. But you’ve got to take the punches.”

He will always be remembered for co-writing The Zutons’ biggest hit Valerie — a bona fide 21st-century pop classic, regularly rated in the UK’s Top Ten karaoke songs.

Dave pinches himself every time he hears it blaring out of a bar. The gloriously catchy 2006 single — “a gift from God” — was the band’s second Top Ten smash.

Then Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson covered it...

Dave told them he didn’t think it'd do well “as we'd had a big hit with it and lightning doesn’t strike twice!”

But it did. Ronson’s faster, more soulful, and even more exhilarating version propelled by a Motown backbeat peaked at No 2 in 2007 becoming Amy’s all-time biggest hit.

Valerie started as a riff in a band rehearsal. McCabe then turned it into a song in his head on a 15-minute taxi ride home to his mum’s.

“I grabbed the guitar, sat in my bedroom, and wrote the rest out, and it all came together in about five minutes. It was pretty spontaneous.”