“It was love at first sight. I broke up with Judy and chased Sharona for a year”: How The Knack wrote My Sharona, the one hit wonder to end all one hit wonders

The Knack posing for a photograph in 1980.

For Doug Fieger, the secret of songwriting success was to stay in touch with his inner teenager. That meant raging hormones, unrequited love, and girls, girls, girls.

“When The Knack started, I wrote songs about girls,” the late frontman told me in 2008. “I think girls is really what rock’n’roll is about.” Indeed, every song on the band’s 1979 debut album Get The Knack feels like it burst out of some sex-crazed adolescent bedroom. And although Fieger was 25 when he wrote it, he told me he “felt sixteen”. And that was all down to his lust for a raven-haired muse named Sharona.