This unashamed tearjerker is one of my favourite songs of all time,. It’s also one of the saddest – a devastating tale of first love, broken dreams, depression and suicide.

It’s the tragic tale of Emmaline, whom the nameless singer first meets when they were five and she first announces her plans to be “a movie queen” one day.

They marry at the age of 17 and, in a tragic twist, she takes her own life in their bedroom with her ambition unfulfilled, leaving a note: “Darling I love you but I just can’t carry on living on dreams no more.” It makes me well up just thinking about it; listening to it makes me tearful every time.

Brown’s plaintive and increasingly distraught howls of her name after he reads the suicide note are chilling to the bone (and a premonition of Suicide’s Frankie Teardrop). To make it even more unbearably poignant, I now learn that it was inspired by the death of singer Errol Brown’s own mother when she was only 38 and he was 19.

In a rare example of poor judgment, RAK record boss Mickie Most thought the song was too slow and morbid to be a hit single but the girls in his office, perhaps starstruck by the charismatic Errol, persuaded him to change his mind and it reached no.3 in March 1974.

Little-known trivia fact: Hot Chocolate performed at the 1981 wedding reception of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Errol Brown died in 2015 from liver cancer at the age of 71, after retiring to live in the Bahamas.