It’s not to my taste, though it is very much of its time, and I wanted to know more, so I looked it up and found that while it topped the US charts it was never a UK hit.

I guess we were too busy with Slade, Sweet and T.Rex to care when Looking Glass (and is there a more ’70s band name than that?!) put out Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl).

So who were they? They were an obscure college band from New Jersey and this song was originally a B-side that appeared on their self-titled debut album in 1972.

There was no real-life girl called Brandy, though singer Elliot Lurie had a high school girlfriend called Randy, so he changed her name for the song just to ensure listeners realised the object of his affection was a girl and not a guy, which would have been inconceivable in 1974.

Not just a girl but a barmaid, who lives in the middle of “a port on a western bay” serving drinks to sex-starved sailors passing through on the way to their next port. “Your eyes could steal a sailor from the sea,” they tell her, though Brandy’s heart already belongs to another mariner whose name she wears on a locket around her neck.

Pointlessly, as it turns out, because he is married to the sea and the peripatetic life of a sailor, leaving poor Brandy to wander the streets of her imaginary harbour town pining for her absent mariner.

And what happened to Looking Glass? Well they did manage a minor hit the following year with a song called Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne before Lurie left the band to pursue a solo career that never took off.