‘I was working as a cook when it went to No 1’: how Norman Greenbaum made Spirit in the Sky

‘My label said a four-minute single with lyrics about Jesus would never get played on radio. But, in 1969, the song sold two million copies. It’s now been No 1 in three different decades’

Spirit in the Sky started as an old blues riff I’d been playing since my college days in Boston, but I didn’t know what to do with it. After I moved to LA, a guy I knew came up with a way of putting a fuzzbox inside my Fender Telecaster, which created the distinctive sound on Spirit in the Sky.