This is my favourite Sparks song – though only a whisker ahead of their next one, Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth.
So strange and otherworldly were they when they arrived on the scene two months earlier with This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us that they might easily have been dismissed as one-hit wonders.

Instead, they’ve gone on to enjoy a successful career spanning more than 50 years, encapsulating the maxim that John Peel once applied to The Fall – “always different, always the same.”

And their most recent album, A Steady Drip Drip Drip, is arguably – no, inarguably – their best since Kimono My House in 1974.

Amateur Hour, which comes from that one, has one of the​ great guitar riffs, which prompts me to realise that I’ve never known the names of any of Sparks apart from the Mael brothers Russell and Ron. At this point in their career they were Adrian Fisher (guitar) Martin Gordon (bass) and Norman ‘Dinky’ Diamond (drums).

It also illustrates Ron’s ability to construct lyrics that paint a picture – usually by invoking a colourful and witty metaphor – that scan and rhyme perfectly:

“The lawns grow plush in the hinterlands
The perfect little setting for the one night stands.
The drapes are drawn and the lights are out
It’s the time to put in practice what you’ve dreamed about.”

If the first verse is about losing your virginity, then the second focuses more on the physical changes of puberty:

“Girls grow tops to go topless in
While we sit and count the hairs that blossom from our chins.
Our voices change at a rapid pace
I could start a song a tenor and then end as bass.”

At the end, the conclusion that perfection in this particular skill set may never be achieved:

“It’s a lot like playing the violin
You cannot start off and be Yehudi Menuhin
So amateur hour goes on and on.”

Brilliant.

• In 1997 Sparks re-recorded a very different version of Amateur Hour for their album Plagiarism with electro band Erasure.