This is one of the strangest songs of the Seventies. Or any other era. Even stranger than that most mysterious of debut singles, Rock On.

Against the backdrop of a heartbeat, producer Jeff Wayne swathes David Essex’s voice in an eerie, echoey production sound filled with empty space, recalling Rock On, while a child’s piano tinkles in the distance.

Then, as the drums come in and a harpsichord picks out a melody, he bathes the song in a vast orchestral backing before a piercing guitar solo emerges, surrounded by symphonic strings.

Stardust, which was a top ten hit in 1975, achieves the impossible feat of sounding epic within a running time of well below three minutes. Pop perfection you might say.

It was the theme song of the film of the same name, in wich Essex reprised his role as fomer fairground romeo Jim MacLaine, whose rise to rock superstardom mirrored his own, and was followed by a predictable fall.

Essex spoke of the parallels in a BBC interview: “All of a sudden you become God, but you know you’re not God. So many of the things we were doing in the film were happening in real life. There were times when I didn’t know whether I was David or Jim.”

The song went on to be covered notably by Martin Gore of Depeche Mode, who remembered Stardust fondly from his own youth, for his 2003 covers album Counterfeit².