Paul Young’s cover of an old Marvin Gaye B-side launched his solo career, thanks in no small part to Pino Palladino’s bassline.

Let’s hear it for that most underappreciated of musical instruments – the bass guitar. So often regarded as no more than one half of the rhythm section, a bassline can transform a song.

But it’s so much more than that. It’s the very foundation of funk and reggae, not only leading the way into a song but in many cases carrying the melody that lives in your head.

Like this song – or, more accurately, this version of this song.

The throb of Pino Palladino’s fretless bass is everything, something you remember even more than Paul Young’s impassioned vocal on a single that launched his solo career in 1983.

And if you’re a classical music buff (which I am definitely not), you may even recognise the source. When producer Laurie Latham asked Pino for an intro, he quoted the bassoon melody at the opening of Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring.

Add the subtle percussion and Young’s beautifully modulated vocal, given plentuy of space to breathe by Latham, and you have an instant classic; so much so that I had no idea it’s a cover version of a deep cut by Marvin Gaye.

Young takes Gaye’s jaunty song from two decades earlier, slows it down, and invests it with a melancholy emotion entirely lacking in Marvin’s original, written with Motown legends Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong.

Young, who was just striking out as a solo artist after his spell in The Q-Tips, later said he remembered hearing the Gaye version when he was 14, on the B-side of his 1962 single Too Busy Thinkin’ ‘Bout My Baby.

Since he would have been a child of six at the time of its release, I’m guessing he may also have heard reggae great John Holt’s lovers rock version, released as the B-side of Turn Back The Hands Of Time in 1978.