TERRY JACKS ‘Seasons In The Sun’ (1974)
Too often dismissed as cheeseshirted bubblegum pop, a tonne of the cheese is actually offset here by the funereal sentiment lurking beneath ‘Seasons In The Sun’. A bright-eyed lyrical rewrite of ‘Le Moribond’ by Jacques Brel from a decade earlier, this letter from a dying man really captured the moment for one of us as it was played out by Ken Bruce on Radio 2 while a stray lump of a KFC Zinger burger got lodged in our windpipe in Knutsford services car park. We survived, but the line “But the stars we could reach / Were just starfish on the beach” still brings a stray lump to the throat.