The very first time I heard the twang of that guitar motif, wobbling and bending out of shape, I was hooked on what must be one of the strangest love songs of all time. And it’s stayed in my head since 1978.

A simple piano melody echoes that guitar in another speaker and, as the bent note begins to fade, in comes a lurching rhythm and a kind of groaning sound like a drunken choir, surrounded by ominous synth sounds.

David Thomas’s voice – imagine David Byrne struggling to avoid being strangled – is for once plaintive and poignant as he sings: “I think about you all the time.”

The lyric is painfully melancholic, as he reiterates his abiding sense of loss “step by step, block by block,” “as the day fades away and the night passes over.”

Codex is the last track on Pere Ubu’s wildly experimental second album Dub Housing.

It’s a contrast to the abrasion and dissonance that precedes it but it fits entirely with the album’s cover shot of a darkened apartment building – where the band lived at the time – against a Cleveland skyline.

Having been a big fan since the band’s debut single, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo and first album The Modern Dance, I went to see Pere Ubu at The Marquee in November 1978, when the garguantuan Thomas – then going by “Crocus Behemoth” – performed with a hammer and anvil.