Terry Jacks’ chart-topping translation of a Jacques Brel song made the top three tunes all ‘death discs’ in April 1974.

I don’t know what was in the water in the Spring of 1974 but at one point the top three places in the pop chart were occupied by ‘death discs’. This was the third, reaching no.1 ahead of Paper Lace (Billy, Don’t Be A Hero) and Hot Chocolate (Emma).

Perhaps it was just the state of the nation that year: two general elections, a three-day week, an IRA bombing campaign and an economic collapse. Not to mention Abba winning Eurovision and Leeds winning the league.

I remember when I was at college in 1976, manning the barricades of the punk revolution and pretending not to have liked any music except Glam before the Pistols and the Clash came into my life, my friend and classmate Adrian Thrills confessed that Seasons In The Sun was his guilty pleasure. Mine too.

I didn’t know then that it was a cover of a French song (Le Moribond) about a dying man bidding farewell to his loved ones, penned and sung by Jacques Brel, although I already knew Brel from the Bowie covers of Amsterdam and My Death.

The Belgian’s lyrics were translated to English by the American poet Rod McKuen for a folk combo called The Kingston Trio, whose rendition caught the ear of Canadian singer Terry Jacks.

Jacks was inspired to cover it by the real-life experience of one of his best friends dying of leukemia at the time. In the macabre original, which Brel wrote in a brothel in Tangeiers, he is dying of a broken heart because his wife is cheating on him with his best friend – and he is bidding final farewells to his priest, offering forgiveness to his best friend and wife Francoise.

Jacks rewrote the lyrics again, including a new last verse, to make it more relevant to his own memory, to be a dying man’s last words a childhood friend, his father and ‘Michelle’ – perhaps a daughter or niece. He first produced a version with The Beach Boys, which had to be abandoned when Brian Wilson began making endless changes to the arrangement, and decided to record it himself.

It is of course utterly saccharine and sentimental – it ws voted no.5 in a CNN poll of “the worst pop songs ever” 15 years ago – but so what? I love it. And so did six million others.

In a morbidly ironic postscript, Brel retired just before the song’s release, after contracting the cancer that would eventually kill him six years later. As for Jacks, he bought a boat with the proceeds, became a Christian and dedicated his life to being an environmental activist.