Sandie Shaw scored her last of her eight Top Ten hits with her 21st single, Monsieur Dupont, in 1969.

I first heard Sandie Shaw when she became Britain’s first winner of the Eurovision Song Contest in 1967, when I was nine years old.

Puppet On A String won by a huge margin and went on to top the singles chart, apparently giving Sandie her third No.1 after (There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me and Long Live Love.

The next time I heard her was when she simpered her way through the sweet but slightly cheesy Monsieur Dupont two years later. It was, astonishingly, her 21st single – and her eighth and final Top Ten hit, reaching No.6.

In my memory it was sung in French but it turns out it isn’t; in fact it was originally recorded in German, by a singer called Manuela, two years before Peter Callender wrote new lyrics to Christian Bruhn’s tune for Sandie.

In the retelling, it’s about a girl who goes to Paris and falls in love with a gallic romeo “with oh-so-gentle continental ways” who loves her in a way that she knows is wrong (*ahem*) and makes her never want to go home again.

The backing vocals on the chorus come over like small children approximating the sound of a typical French yé-yé tune but are actually by Sandie and her band of session musicians, which includes the guitarists Big Jim Sullivan and the splendidly named Vic Flick.

Here’s Sandie, barefoot as ever, singing it on Top of the Pops back in the days of black-and-white telly in 1969.