Babybird, aka Stephen Jones, had been making home demos for five years without a record deal when You’re Gorgeous shot into the chart.

It’s funny how some songs stay with you since the day they were a hit, while others seem to disappear into the mists of time, never to be remembered. I haven’t heard You’re Gorgeous in years. And yet, hearing it again now, it doesn’t seem to have aged a bit.

It was always an outlier: Babybird, aka Stephen Jones, came out of nowhere when the song became a hit in October 1996. He didn’t even have a record deal.

Jones had been making home demos and living on the dole for five years in Nottingham, where he went to study acting and joined an experimental theatre group, releasing five lo-fi albums of his songs.

This one didn’t fit into any genre; in fact, a quick look at the singles chart back then confirms that there were no prevalent genres at that time. The Chemical Brothers were No.1 with Setting Sun, followed by the dreadful Breakfast At Tiffanys by Deep Blue Something.

After that it was Celine Dion, Donna Lewis (who?) and B.B.E. (ditto). The only familiar names in the Top 10 were the Fugees and the Manics, though I don’t remember the latter’s song (Kevin Carter) at all.

It was into this wilderness that Babybird arrived with the perfect simplicity of You’re Gorgeous, a tender love song with a catchy melody and a dark subtext, barely hinted at in the title of the album it came from: Ugly Beautiful.

On the surface it was an expression of pure love – and that’s how most listeners took it. But beneath the surface lay a strong feminist message about the exploitation of women in advertising, sung from the point of view of a photographer’s model.

Jones later explained the song to The Guardian: “In the ’70s and ’80s you’d regularly see images of women in bikinis draped over car bonnets. I wanted to flip that – and see how a male photographer would feel if he had to lie over a car in a thong, to prove how gross it is.”

Not that its message was understood by all listeners, seduced by the pretty tune. In the same interview, Jones revealed that he had frequently been asked to sing it at fans’ weddings.

It turns out it’s just me who hasn’t heard it in years: it’s been used by the BBC over  footage of Barack Obama, Prince William played it when DJing (who knew!) and a couple of years ago it soundtracked a Tesco ad.

Another Babybird song, Unloveable, had a brilliantvideo directed by Johnny Depp (who also played guitar) and starring Stephen Graham, and The F-Word was used as the theme tune of a Gordon Ramsay TV show (no brainer!).