Songfacts®:

• "The One in the Middle" is a witty pop song from Manfred Mann, a band that by the time they released it in 1965 had already proven they could do earnest blues ("Hubble Bubble (Toil and Trouble)"), big-hearted pop ("5-4-3-2-1"), and, when pressed, a good line in Bob Dylan covers. Here, though, they go tongue-in-cheek in a song that skewers the very pop-group stereotypes the band were busy benefiting from.
• Paul Jones, the group's nattily dressed, harmonica-wielding frontman, originally penned the song for Keith Relf of The Yardbirds.
  
  "I wrote it about the Yardbirds, the difference between the musicality of Eric (Clapton), Paul Samwell-Smith and the others and the dashy looks of Keith Relf," he told Mojo magazine." I offered them the song, and Keith said, 'I'm not singing this, it's embarrassing!'"
  
  It was, to be fair, a risky proposition: the lyrics call out the band members one by one, zeroing in on "the one in the middle," the pretty boy frontman whose job, it seems, is to stand there looking sweet while everyone else does the heavy lifting. It's a theme that would have made Relf blush, but Jones delivered with a knowing wink to the audience.
• The song appeared as the lead track on Manfred Mann's The One In The Middle EP, which also included a version of Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man," Phil Spector and Doc Pomus' ballad "What Am I to Do," and a cover of Bob Dylan's "With God On Our Side." They included "With God On Our Side" after Dylan declared the band "real groovy" after seeing one of their gigs. It opened the door to more Dylan reworkings, from "Just Like A Woman" to the mighty, chart-stomping "Quinn The Eskimo)," which became so synonymous with Manfred Mann that some listeners still think they wrote it.
• The EP was a smash, taking the #1 spot on the UK EP charts three separate times, staying there for a total of nine weeks in the summer of 1965. The record's success demonstrated the band's widespread popularity at the time.