This song is my guiltiest secret. It’s so sentimental and cheesy yet so perfect, with a mood to match its title and a melody to match its lyric – a perfectly constructed coming-of-age story.

The scene is set with the sound of waves and seagulls shrieking, before that perfect little piano melody, like a cooling spray of water on that hot afternoon, the last day in June, when the sun is a demon.

You can almost feel the sap rising as Goldsboro tells the tale of the 17-year-old boy who “knows nothing of love” spotting the 31-year-old woman who “knows everything.” You can almost feel the sweltering sun and “the sweat trickling down the front of her gown.”

It came out in one of those endless summers you only have when you’re a child. I was on a family beach holiday at Croyde Bay in Devon, on the cusp of adolescence: too young to be deflowered by an older woman but old enough to know, as I surveyed the bikini-clad bodies on the beach, it was something I would love to do.

They walk a mile to the beach and she promises to “chase the boy in you away.” The last line of her seduction is devastating in its concision: “We sat on the sand, and the boy took her hand / But I saw the sun rise as a man.”

It was a far cry from Goldsboro’s tearjerker Honey, about the death of a man’s wife, which became the biggest-selling single in the world five years before this. And even further from his Northern Soul stompers like It’s Too Late and Too Many People.

Apparently this hit earned Goldsboro his own TV show and in the Nineties he composed sitcom music and created a childrten’s TV series with the excellent name The Swamp Critters Of Lost Lagoon, for which he voiced all the characters, wrote all the scripts, played all the instruments and sang the theme song.