At the very beginning of Covid Island Discs (Day 3 in fact) I posted the song Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits. The back story to that song was that in year 11 we had to write an essay on our two favourite rock songs and analyse their lyrics (you can read about it here). However, our English teacher, who set us the writing task at the time (her name was Mrs Jackson), also presented her two favourite songs and this was one of them.

After she presented this very sad song, one to the guys in the class said “What’s all this about is this singer gay or something?” Needless to say this comment reduced a class of young 17 year old boys to fits of laughter much to the chagrin of our poor long suffering English teacher.