Dr Hook & The Medicine Show had their first hit with one of the great break-up songs in Sylvia’s Mother, which reached No.2  in the summer of ’72.

Anyone who doesn’t fight back tears when listening to this has a heart of stone. Sylvia’s Mother oozes emotion, specifically loss and the pain of separation. It’s therefore no surprise to learn (albeit nearly 50 years later) that it’s essentially a true story.

Shel Silverstein, the cartoonist and children’s story writer who composed it (and managed and produced Dr Hook & the Medicine Show), really was in love with a girl called Sylvia who left him.

And he really did phone her mother (Mrs Avery in the song; Mrs Pandolfi IRL) to beg for her to come back while she was sitting next to her. But she really had got engaged to someone else and was about to go off to spend the rest of her life with him – albeit to become a museum curator in Mexico rather than by catching the nine o’clock train to Galveston.

Silverstein told Rolling Stone in 1972: “I just changed the last name, not to protect the innocent, but because it didn’t fit. It happened about eight years ago and was pretty much the way it was in the song. I called Sylvia and her mother said, ‘She can’t talk to you.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ Her mother said she was packing and she was leaving to get married, which was a big surprise to me.

“The guy was in Mexico and he was a bullfighter and a painter. At the time I thought that was like being a combination brain surgeon and encyclopedia salesman. Her mother finally let me talk to her, but her last words were, ‘Shel, don’t spoil it.'”

Whether his call was regularly interrupted by an operator demanding 40 cents more for the next three minutes, I’m not so sure. It certainly adds to the emotional drama which, frankly, is already at breaking point.

I mean, come on, how sad is that? And how weird must it be for the real Sylvia Pandolfi every time she hears that song on the radio to hear some bloke she doesn’t know (Dennis Locorriere), who didn’t even write the song, and who isn’t even ‘Dr Hook’ (that’s Ray Sawyer) declare his undying love for her?