Listening today, 40 years later, it’s so obvious how much Lloyd Cole & The Commotions borrowed from Bob Dylan. Perfect Skin is almost a hybrid of Dylan’s twangy mid-60s period and the country-tinged moments of Lou Reed with the Velvets.

The imagery in the lyrical wordplay, which Cole came up with over a weekend in his room at Glasgow Golf Club, where his parents lived and worked, and the serpentine guitar riff both evoke Dylan.

Which is no surprise, since they were trying to be a soul band until Cole, who had dropped out of uni in Glasgow to form a band, was advised to listen to Blonde On Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited and they found their niche.

He later said he’d been “drunk on Dylan” at the time and would never have been able to write Perfect Skin before hearing Subterranean Homesick Blues.

I remember their first appearance on Top of the Pops and being spellbound by this song. I wasn’t really what you’d call a “lyric person” but I was instantly entranced by the singer’s obsession with a weather girl called Louise who had “cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin” and was “sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan.”

I wanted to meet Louise. She sounded like my kind of girl: a girl who, at the age of ten, somehow looked like Greta Garbo.

I don’t think she was a real weather girl who did the forecast on TV, it was just a turn of phrase, but Cole’s turns of phrase were spellbinding, especially to an aspiring writer like me.

Especially that final line: “Strikes me the moral of this song must be there has never been one.”