Dennis Locorriere was the singer of Dr Hook’s hit singles Sylvia’s Mother, Sexy Eyes and When You’re In Love With A Beautiful Woman. But he was not the one with the eye patch and cowboy hat.

Obituaries are not a natural place to find humour but the death of Dr Hook’s Dennis Locorrierre brought two reactions that made me laugh out loud.

I read of his demise on my friend Jez’s site dedicated to dead rock stars, Number One in Heaven, beneath which another friend Richard Thomas inquired: “Has anyone told Mrs Avery?” To which Jez, aka Jeremy Simmonds, replied: “They might be short of the required 40 cents.”

Both comments made me chuckle; perhaps even more so because of the knowledge they would mean nothing to anyone unfamiliar with Dr Hook’s first hit single, Sylvia’s Mother.

One of the great break-up songs, sung by Dennis in a voice teetering on the brink of tears, finds him calling the girl who’s left him to tell her he loves her. But she’s given her heart to another man and won’t even speak to him.

Anyone who doesn’t fight back tears when listening to this song – No.2 back in 1972 – has a heart of stone: Sylvia’s Mother oozes emotion, specifically loss and the pain of separation. What’s more, it’s all true. Even the name Sylvia (though her surname was Pandolfi).

Silverstein, the cartoonist and children’s story writer who composed it (and managed and produced Dr Hook & the Medicine Show, as they were initially called), really had been in love with a girl called Sylvia who left him.

And he really did phone her mother (Mrs Avery in the song; Pandolfi being too much of a mouthful for a pop song) to beg for her to come back to him. Not only that but Sylvia while was sitting right next to her when he called.

She really had got engaged to someone else – a bullfighter and painter – and was about to go off to spend the rest of her life with hi; albeit to become a museum curator in Mexico rather than by catching the nine o’clock train to Galveston.

Whether his call was regularly interrupted by an operator demanding 40 cents more for the next three minutes, I’m not so sure.

And now we can never ask Dennis, who – by the way – was not the one with the eye patch and the cowboy hat who sang some of their other hits. That was Ray Sawyer.

But it was Dennis who sang Sylvia’s Mother, Sexy Eyes and their biggest hit of all, the chart-topping When You’re In Love With A Beautiful Woman.

And, although he came from New Jersey, I now learn that he latterly lived in West Sussex.