Singer and songwriter.

Born: September 6, 1940

Died: March 21, 2015.

Jackie Trent, who has died after a long illness aged 74, was a singer courted by the Kray twins when appearing in London clubs in the 1950s, knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts in the 1960s, and co-wrote one of the world's best-known theme songs in the 1980s.

Australian TV producers were planning a new soap opera and were going to call it Ramsay Street, until they heard Trent's lyric "Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours."

Thirty years and more than 7,000 episodes later, Neighbours is still going and still uses the same iconic theme song, although it has been recorded by several different singers.

A coal miner's daughter, Trent was originally Yvonne Burgess, born in Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire in 1940. She made her mark on local talent shows and by her early teens was singing professionally in local clubs, where she was styled as "the Vera Lynn of the Potteries".

She recalled: "In 1955 I abandoned school, packed a single suitcase and, clutching my precious music case, I caught the train to London - alone, no agent, no contacts and no work."

She was not without work for long. "The Krays would sometimes escort me to the clubs and theatres where I worked, showering me with teddy bears," she said.

Her early singles made no impact on the charts and an assignment to write and record a song that would simply feature in a scene in the drama series It's Dark Outside did not suggest her chart fortunes were about to change.

But Tony Hatch, who wrote the music, had enjoyed success with Petula Clark, and his composition Downtown was high in the charts. Trent wrote the lyrics for the new song, entitled Where Are You Now, recorded it and thought little more of it.

When the show went out, shops were swamped with requests for the record and the song knocked the Beatles' Ticket to Ride off the Number One spot in May 1965.

Its success led to further collaborations with Trent as composer and Hatch as lyricist, including the follow-up single When Summertime is Over, but it barely scraped into the Top 40.

Trent said later that she initially disliked Hatch. He was married when they met, but the two became lovers and eventually husband and wife. Their initial affair inspired the song I Couldn't Live Without Your Love, a hit for Petula Clark in 1966.

It was as a songwriter, in partnership with Tony Hatch, that Trent enjoyed her greatest success. Their songs were recorded by stars of the calibre of Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley Bassey.

In the 1970s she and Hatch wrote the stage musicals The Card, which was produced in London's West End, and Rock Nativity, which was staged at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, during the Christmas 1975-76 season and broadcast by Scottish Television.

Trent and Hatch moved to Australia and then to Minorca. They eventually divorced. Recently Trent had been working on a musical based on her own life. She is survived by her second husband and by two grown-up children.

BRIAN PENDREIGH