This sweetly sentimental slice of soul, featuring the featherlight falsetto of 16-year-old Marcel King, was England’s answer to The Stylistics. Surprisingly, Sweet Sensation came not from Philly – but Manchester.

They came to fame on the ITV talent show New Faces and were mentored by one of the judges, Tony Hatch, who wrote and produced a string of hits for a plethora of Sixties stars – and that earworm of a Crossroads theme tune.

Hatch, who had once performed with David Bowie (as a member of Davy Jones & the Lower Third) in a failed audition for the BBC in 1965, helped get them a deal with Pye Records but their first single, Snow Fire, flopped.

Their second, this meticulous recreation of the lush Philly sound, with King’s vocal startlingly similar to the pre-pubescent Michael Jackson, topped the charts in October 1974.

They had only one more hit, Purely By Coincidence, and broke up in the late Seventies. But in an unlikely renaissance, Marcel returned as a solo singer on Tony Wilson’s Factory label in 1985.

He recorded the self-penned Reach For Love in collaboration with fellow Mancs Bernard Sumner of New Order and Donald Johnson of A Certain Ratio, seen here performing with a team of breakdancers at legendary Manchester club The Hacienda. 

Marcel, who ran a studio called The Kitchen in Hulme, died of a brain haemorrhage in 1995, aged only 38 and. Even more tragically, two years later his son Zeus was shot dead in a gang feud in the Manchester district of Longsight at the age of only 18.

Another founder member, keyboard player Leroy Smith, died in 2009 in his flat above the restaurant he owned in Manchester, and vocalist Vinnie James died in 2019.