The song was the first to be recorded at
Strawberry Studios in
Stockport, England, on new four-track
Ampex equipment purchased by studio owners
Eric Stewart,
Graham Gouldman and Peter Tattersall. It featured a simple repeated chorus and a heavy drum rhythm that Gouldman's manager,
Harvey Lisberg, has claimed became influential in pop music. He said: "I think a lot of people were very influenced by 'Neanderthal Man', which was something new in drum sounds, using four drums on a four-track machine. When
Gary Glitter came along with his records, I thought I could hear the same sort of sound deep down in there. I think there were a lot of other people who copied the sound, maybe unintentionally." Stewart said Philips were not entirely content with the song, however: "The next thing that happened after we'd done the deal was that we got a phone call from them. 'We like the record,' they said, 'but we can't hear the words!' We had about three phone calls about that, and each time I explained that they weren't supposed to hear the words. Eventually they agreed to release it just as we wanted it." He said there was one further hitch before the song was released: a loud metallic burst towards the end of the song blew a £1200 cutter head as the track was being mastered in the
Phonogram cutting suite. He explained: "We had a sound on that track that was something that had never been recorded before. We'd made the sound by taking a large 6 ft by 4 ft sheet of steel into the studio. It was actually a sheet we were going to fireproof one of the doors with – and then at the right moment we had hit it with a hammer. The hammer blow gave it such a shock frequency-wise that the equipment just couldn't take it. At the time this was an embarrassment to all of us, but that faded into insignificance when we found ourselves with such a massive hit on our hands." ==Chart success and later work==