I was still riding around on my Raleigh Chopper bike, thinking I was cool, when Tina Charles (nee Hoskins) burst into the charts with what may be our first home-grown disco hit, I’m On Fire.

Disco was born in the dance clubs of New York and it’s fair to say that the UK was not its natural home in an era of Wimpy bars and Austin Allegros.

There was something of a sexy-older-sister vibe about Tina, a fuller-figured East End girl and a kind of precursor of Sally James on Tiswas.

She was the singer of 5000 Volts, a group formed by Martin Aston with a rotating cast of session musicians, and this song started life as the B-side of a flop single called Bye Love until radio DJs flipped it over and it rose to no.4 in the chart.

For contractual reasons Tina could not be credited on the single and was replaced on Top of the Pops by a Hammer Horror actress called Luan Peters (aka Karol Keyes), though the clip above is definitely her.

She’d been around a while, making her first solo single in 1969 – accompanied by an unknown session pianist called Reg Dwight – and first earned a living impersonating pop stars on those cheap ‘Top of the Pops’ compilations featuring terrible cover versions of the hits of the day, and terrible covers usually featuring a dolly bird in a crochet bikini on the cover.

Advancing to TV, Tina took her talents to The Two Ronnies (singing Ruby Tuesday and River Deep, Mountain High) and graduated to session work, singing the backing vocals on Cockney Rebel’s chart topper Make Me Smile with her friend Linda Lewis.

This infectious slice of pop-disco – almost identitcal to the later disco hit Black Is Black – brought Tina her first hit and soon after this she went solo and topped the chart with I Love To Love.