1978: Your fantasy

While we were having our extension built, this was a minor hit. But it caught my imagination.

As the plaster dried to a darkish grey colour, I'd slink into the upstairs room that was to be my extended bedroom and imagine I was some sort of rock sex god, throwing myself against the walls in an suggestive, yearning fashion, rolling around to sing this song - to me the very pinnacle of eroticism in music - into the camera in my imaginary head-to-toe leather gear like I was indeed the lead singer of Exile.

I was 13. I was wearing turquoise polo neck knitted by Auntie Maggie and ghaslty too long for me wildly flared denims my dad had got wholesale from a discount warehouse somewhere in Somerset. But you have to fill your pockets with dreams, right?

I'm not sure I really heard it again until 1998, when I was the passenger of an ancient chain-smoking Granada TV on-set photographer zipping across the M62 from Coronation Street, where I'd had a 15-minute window to present the similarly chain-smoking Anne Kirkbride with a magazine award (amazing legs), to Emmerdale, where I was to do a similar thing with some other cast members I cannot now recall. Lisa Riley and Claire King may well have been involved.

It all came flooding back. I died a little inside and took another cigarette. I've since discovered Serge Gainsbourg.