This song is so strangely timeless: it sounded ahead of its time in 1973 and it still sounds futuristic half a century later.

The marvellously minimalist production is what makes it. As with so many of the greatest songs, and the greatest song productions, it’s all about the spaces in between; in this case in between Herbie Flowers’s bass guitar and our ears.

Not so much a Wall of Sound as Wall of Space, its haunting echo emphasising the nostalgia of the lyrics, conjuring memories of Fifties icons James Dean (“Jimmy Dean”), Elvis Presley (“Blue Suede Shoes”) and Eddie Cochran (“Summertime Blues”).

According to producer Jeff Wayne, Essex played him his demo and then began tapping out an improvised rhythm with his hands on a bin. “I went away and thought about the song and the attractiveness was the hollows, the absences and the mood in the lyrics as well. So I had this idea that there would be nothing that played a chord – that’s why there’s no keyboards, no guitars, nothing that plays a chord.”

The magic ingredient, as with Walk On The Wild Side, is Herbie Flowers’s double-tracked bass guitar (one an octave higher than the other) with that shimmering slapback delay – a distinctive sound that I have always thought was the template for Prince’s intro to Sign O’The Times.

Like his Lou Reed contribution, Flowers suggested playing two bass parts not just to improve the song, but so he would be paid double under Musicians Union rules – earning himself the princely sum of £24 instead of the usual £12.

Although David Essex, with his cheeky grin and Cockney costumes, subsequently became more of a teen idol than a serious musician, and topped the charts twice (Gonna Make You A Star and Hold Me Close) I liked him.

I had seen him onstage in Godspell in the West End a couple of years earlier: a production notable for the cast sitting on the edge of the stage to hand out plastic cups of wine to the audience at the end.

And I would soon see him in the film That’ll Be The Day, where, as I recall, he played a cheeky Cockney chappie working on the dodgems in a fairground. Not to be confused with the cheeky Cockney chappie he played in everything else, including some sit-com in the Eighties that involved a canal boat, if memory serves.

Or the cheeky Cockney chappie he actually was, being the son of an East End docker and an Irish Traveller. Anyway… watch out for the weirdo in the front row at the start of this.