The red Dansette is safely installed. All I need now is a rack for my many dozens of 7″ singles.

Some of the singles could be placed in a bag and taken to a charity shop. I would have no intention of ever playing them.

Records like Terry Jacks’ Seasons in the Sun might go. It wasn’t just miserable, there were plenty of miserable songs, it was morbid.

In my memories of 1974, it had seemed like a reworking of Tom Jones’ awful Green, green grass of home. Tom Jones had sung about a man waiting to be executed and Seasons in the Sun seemed to be about a similar theme.

Admittedly, Seasons in the Sun has no mention of the walls of a prison cell or people coming for him, but the second stanza would suggest that these are the final words of a condemned man:

Goodbye Papa, please pray for me,
I was the black sheep of the family
You tried to teach me right from wrong
Too much wine and too much song
wonder how I got along.
Goodbye Papa, it’s hard to die
When all the birds are singing in the sky
Now that the spring is in the air
Little children everywhere
When you see them, I’ll be there.

Terry Jacks’ song was Number One around the world, (being one of a small number of singles to sell more than ten million copies worldwide).

Only much more recently did I discover that it had nothing to do with someone awaiting sentence, it was actually about a terminally ill man lying at home.

Furthermore, the song was not an original piece of work but was a translation of Le Moribond, a song by Jacques Brel, a singer, songwriter actor and director whose work was internationally respected and whose songs had been covered by some of the greatest names in music history – including Joan Baez, David Bowie, Glen Campbell, Ray Charles, John Denver, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams – oh, and Tom Jones. Brel was not a name to take lightly.

Perhaps Seasons in the Sun deserves more respect than I gice it. But every time I hear it played, Brel or no Brel, it seems as bad as it had in 1974.

It was not surprising to discover that an online poll had nominated it as one of the worst songs in history – not that a singer who sold ten million copies of a record will have been worried about what people thought – or whether someone gave a charity shop one of those ten million discs