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)

“I gulped down several Heinekens. I felt drunk. Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music stood at the back, watching the show. I went and introduced myself. He was puzzled, and polite. He said he was in Los Angeles to make a record. He was living in the Malibu colony house which had once belonged to Fritz Lang. I told him a story about a friend of mine, a film-maker who loved Lang’s work and came to Los Angeles to interview him. This was in the 1970s, not long before Lang died. Somehow my friend never got round to the interview. He felt the city had robbed him of his will.
Ferry smiled. I told him I thought “Can’t Let Go”, a song he’d recorded when Jerry Hall was dumping him for Mick Jagger, was one of the best things written about LA: ‘They said go west young man that’s best, it’s there you’ll feel no pain, Bel-Air’s okay if you dig the grave, but I want to live again.’ I told him I thought the song was very good on the experience of feeling rootless in a foreign place. He looked embarrased. I told him I was an Englishman, having a bit of woman trouble myself.
He smiled again. He obviously thought I was wrong in the head. But the judgement of a man who had once appeared in public wearing toreador pants was not to be trusted.”
Richard Rayner
Los Angeles Without A Map (1988)

Download: Can’t Let Go – Bryan Ferry (mp3)
Buy: “The Bride Stripped Bare” (album)