Peter Skellern’s 1972 single “You’re A Lady” was given to my mother as a present from a bloke she was having an affair with at the time. Well, technically he was the one having the affair as he was married with kids while my mother was separated and free to see who the hell she wanted. All very “Play For Today” and “Bouquet of Barbed Wire” I know.

This is a very romantic record to woo a woman with but it’s a particularly English sort of romantic. The opening melancholy notes played by a colliery brass band places it under the coal black sky of some cold and drizzly Northern town rather than, say, Paris or Rome. The man in the song is walking a woman home down a dark, empty street after a dance, trying to summon up the courage to express his feelings for her, but the language of love doesn’t come easily to his Lancashire tongue and all he can blurt out is the plain “you’re a lady, I’m a man.” You can picture him nervously looking down at his shoes, couching his feelings in blandly polite phrases – “Here I sit and hope that you’ll love me” and “I’m not asking you to marry me, Just a little love to show” – as if he’s asking to borrow a cup of sugar from her, if she doesn’t mind of course. Like the affair between Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in “Brief Encounter” this is the awkward, hesitant romance of dingy tea rooms between people who keep their passion buttoned up under conversations about library books and overdue trains.

It’s also a incredibly beautiful-sounding record, intimate and warm but as big and grand as an old Victorian dancehall. It’s probably an English thing, but I find it hard to hear a colliery brass band without feeling a wistful glow (like a Hovis commercial) and the backing choral voices have the heavenly tone of a Salvation Army choir saving souls in the shadow of dark satanic mills. I don’t know what effect this had on my mother but it makes me swoon every time.

Download: You’re A Lady – Peter Skellern
Buy: “The Very Best of Peter Skellern” (album)