This song sounds as strange today as it did when I first heard it on the John Peel Show in 1981. It always does. An a capella song eight and a half minutes long, based on an operatic aria from a century earlier, it was the unlikeliest of hit singles. And yet… Such was its unique appeal that it reached No.2 in the UK charts.

Laurie Anderson was an unknown New York performance artist at the time and her inspiration for this song was an aria from Massenet’s opera El Cid.

The backing track (such as it is) consists of a vocal loop of Anderson singing a single syllable (“Ha”) and a spoken telephone conversation processed through a Vocoder.

The B-side to the original single is another spoken word piece called Walk The Dog. It’s six minutes long – and even stranger.