Blowin' Free

The music is credited to the band and the lyrics chiefly to Martin Turner; the vocal is shared among Turner, Powell and Ted Turner. Songfacts says the lyrics grew from a memory of a teenage summer in Torquay, which had many Swedish holidaymakers. The riff has two claimants: Ted Turner says it was his, influenced by Steve Miller's "Children of the Future", while Powell said in 2013 that he took chord ideas from Pete Townshend while touring with the Who and sped them up. The band's own timeline says they recorded a new version in July 1972 for a double A-side single with "No Easy Road", though Wikipedia lists the song as the B-side and no UK chart entry; it was also the B-side to "Phoenix" (1977).

It is on Live Dates (December 1973), they played it on Midnight Special on US television in March 1974 and the At the BBC box has ten versions of it. Setlist.fm counts 854 plays among 2,784 setlists, and recent sets often close with it. Powell told Classic Rock in 2021 that it summed up a generation trying to find its feet. We found no verified covers or samples, and do not know whether our upload is the album, single or a live version.