Gemma Craven, actress(1988)

Elisabeth Welch, singer(1990)

Lawrence Dallaglio, rugby player(2011).

In terms of the meaning of the song, the references are made with an irony tinged with envy that people would have understood. They would not have taken it either as an endorsement of the celebrity lifestyle referred to, nor as a complete rejection of it, but as the expression of a particular emotional reaction. You can like the song without agreeing with the narrator – his rather priggish, intrusive attitiude to Marie-Claire rings true but isn’t necessarily meant to be taken at face value. Listeners might also have identifed with the theme of social climbing and whether you can or should really leave your roots behind (the generation that listened to this had seen two decades of rapid social mobility).

Why would John Peel have hated it? His generation of the middle class tended to embrace US culture (although not US policy) as an antidote to that of the older British generation. The older middle class generation in Britain in the 50s and 50s tended to associate France and Italy with ‘continental’ sophistication’ and this would be shared by many in the lower middle and working classes, so plenty of reasons for middle class rebels of the 60s began to reject this. Presumably Peel, like several commentators here, could not imagine that the mass audience might understand the ironies of the song and would assume that it expressed some feeble aspiration to the ‘jet set lifestyle’.

For me the song brings back the 70s when I thought that smoking Gitanes sans filtre was the height of authenticity. The fact that it wasn’t doesn’t stop me liking it.

P.S. Frozen Orange Juice seems like a masterpiece by comparison.

(And your Sarstedt was born in India/Slumdog Millionaire link is massively tenuous – thousands of Brits were born there before independence, not least Cliff Richard).

Sure, it name-drops brands and “exotic” locations and famous people — and the comments seem to be slagging the song off for doing that.

But the *song* isn’t doing the name-dropping of those brands and locations and people; it is *Marie-Claire* that is name-dropping those things, and the song is trying to call her back to reality. The song is critiquing Marie-Claire’s obsession with them. The song wants us to see how false all that stuff is: the song is rooted, it is Marie-Claire who has lost that.

The commentators who are slagging the song for its pseudo-Frenchness and obsession with brands are failing to get inside the lyric — get inside *his* head, if you like… All of those elements are there, of course, but they are not being presented as good things: they are the things that have destroyed Marie-Claire. The lyric wants you to see how clutzy all that stuff is, because the singer wants to tell Marie-Claire that none of that stuff matters.

Loads of comments have focussed on the contrived falseness of the “a-ha-ha-ha” line — but it is deliberately that way, because it is not the narrator/singer who is laughing. That is the false, contrived laugh of Marie-Claire. Maybe her sophisticated brand-obsessed name-dropping jet-set friends think her laughter is real, but the narrator knows it is a deliberately contrived, fake joyity that really only tries to hide the hurt — the hurt she still feels when she’s alone, with none of her high class friends around her, alone in her bed…

It seems to me that almost all of the criticisms of the song in the comments here are actually it’s strengths. You say it is “faux sophistication” — but it’s the singer’s intention to say that Marie-Claire’s airs and graces are just faux. You say the French accent is forced — but the singer is telling Marie-Claire that, if she is honest enough to remember, she isn’t really French, everything about her is forced.

Sarstedt was born in India, and I’ll draw a parallel to Slumdog Millionaire here — the storyline is the same, even if the parallel is a bit forced. You can’t blame the girl for escaping her poverty however she could, and you can’t blame the boy for still loving her. Except, in Slumdog, he becomes a millionaire too. In “My Lovely”, the boy is for always left behind — you have a picture of him standing in the street watching her being swept away by one of her boyfriends in a limousine while he busks on his accordion for a few cents.

It’s a great song, for all the reasons the commentators have been criticising. And for more: the constant repetitions of “yes you do” “yes you are” “yes I do” “yes it does” etc… a chorus within a verse, followed by a chorus with a chorus inside of it.

Not a “10″, for sure, but certainly not a “3″ either. One of a kind, never repeated because it can’t be repeated. I’d give it 7, and shame on the people who spewed so much bile on it.

Btw, I have been to the magnificence which is Paris many times, oftentimes staying in a hotel off the Boulevard Saint Michel just past the Sorbonne. I have to admit that I have more than once wandered up and down that street trying to work out where Marie Clare’s fancy apartment could have been. But then this was after a more than agreeable prolonged lunch.

I don’t think he’s being satirical. He used the same over-earnest approach on seventies radio hit Beirut, which I’m assuming wasn’t satirical or ironic.

Follow-up no.10 hit Frozen Orange Juice, on the other hand, is a blissful scoot around the Massif Central. In a Morgan. With the top down. Top summer comp recommendation! Similar ingredients but none of the midbrow cultural grandstanding.

But still, a much better effort than the poxy nursery rhymes that were riding high in the charts at the end of ’68. Re the rather inauthentic portrait of France it paints, I suspect that the South of France seemed much more exotic and faraway to dour English folk then, before the invention of the Chunnel, twenty quid flights on Easyjet or even the internet, I suspect he would have got away with it…

I would kill Peter Sarstedt now. Fucking moustache would-be murderer. This is the worst song I’ve ever heard. IN! MY! LIFE!

Don’t think too much. Enjoy.

I love the little tastes it gives of the sixties and the riviera. It got to number 1 because it is sui generis (no other song exploits the zeitgeist as well).

It defined the times beautifully and hearing it now is like finding piles of old newspapers in a loft. It is Sophia Loren, but it is also Lady Penelope.

I loved it then. I love it now.

race??