Diana Ross will always enjoy a special place in my affections – the Queen of Motown sang the first song on the first album I ever bought.

In the Christmas holidays of 1971, when I was 13, I was thrilled to be given a record token. I went straight to WH Smith in Harlow Town Centre and spent it on my first LP, Motown Chartbusters Volume 6.

I played it to death and remember it so well: the cover was a Roger Dean picture of a spaceship that looked like a giant fly.

Those Motown Chartbusters albums were a wonderful, and affordable, way to get an introduction to some of the greatest artists of the era.

Volume 6 included the Temps and the Tops, Stevie and Smokey and the Jackson 5. Two of my favourites were R. Dean Taylor’s brilliant Indiana Wants Me and The Supremes, still making hits after Diana’s departure, with Nathan Jones, sung in unison by Jean Terrell, Mary Wilson, Cindy Birdsong.

But Diana was still the queen and rightly took pride of place at the start of the album. This was the first track on Side 1 and it’s still one of my favourite Diana Ross songs; perhaps my favourite solo single of hers.

Released after her first big solo hit with Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, the melancholy I’m Still Waiting had been a flop in America and was tucked away as an album track in the UK. But thanks to the tireless efforts of Tony Blackburn on Radio 1, it was finally released as a single and went straight to No.1 in the summer of ’71.

It’s a sad song, about a little girl of five who fell in love with a ten-year-old boy who moved away. Now that she’s grown up, she’s never been able to find love again because – as the title suggests – she’s spent her whole life waiting for him to come back.

It’s just heartbreaking.