Songfacts®:

• "'Judy Teen' was a boy/girl story, a teenage romance," Steve Harley explained. "A bit of sex in there, interesting drum rhythm, hooks all over the place - lo and behold big hit! It's a good sexy little teenage love story. When I wrote 'Judy Teen,' I was 18 or 19 when I had the experience that that song came from."
  
  He added: "When the first album came out, the record company said, 'We don't have a single.' And I said very arrogantly, 'I'll write one, I know how to do it.' That's exactly what I said and exactly what I did. Now I think - what an arrogant young man, fearless!"
• As you can surmise from their name, Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel were a British band. "Judy Teen" was their first hit in their homeland, though their previous and debut single "Sebastian" was a hit in continental Europe. They never broke through in America.
• Harley sings in the song of a brief, but memorable adolescent romance with an American girl. "Like it says in the lyrics, she was in from New York," he told Classic Rock. "She was very funny. And very naughty too. She taught me quite a lot, to be honest. She was very rude."
• Cockney Rebel recorded "Judy Teen" in Abbey Road's No. 2 studio where The Beatles laid down their songs. Steve Harley co-produced it with Alan Parsons, who was a young Abbey Road engineer in those days. He'd earned his first credit a few years previously as an assistant engineer on the Abbey Road album.
• Unusually for a rock song, "Judy Teen" as no lead guitar; instead, it is based around the electric violin riffs of Jean-Paul Crocker. The other Cockney Rebel musicians were:
  
  Paul Jeffreys: Fender bass
  Milton Reame-James: keyboards
  Stuart Elliott: drums, percussion
• Harley wrote all the drum patterns himself and told Elliott what to do. "The 'dum-dum-dum-crash' sound is actually three of us leaning over the wooden staircase that goes down to the studio and control room, with us mic'd-up and slapping the rail with our open palms," he recalled. "I said to Alan: 'That's a really good trick.' And he went: 'Yeah, I nicked it from Roy Wood.' There's a Move single with that sound on it, which Roy had come up with. And Alan nicked it for us."