Singer songwriter

Born: December 10, 1941;

Died: January 8, 2017

PETER Sarstedt, who has died aged 75 after suffering from progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological condition, was a singer songwriter who achieved world-wide fame in the late Sixties.

Sarstedt’s success came with Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?, a UK Number One in 1969 for four weeks which also topped the charts in Europe and Australia. The song won Sarstedt an Ivor Novello award, which he shared with David Bowie’s Space Oddity.

However, Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? almost never made it onto vinyl. Record company bosses simply couldn’t tune into this five minute song with its waltz beat, accordion backing, no drums and reeked of Gauloises, Jacques Brel and tortured artists in Montmartre.

They didn’t believe pop fans could connect with so many cultural allusions, this story of a pauper who moves to an Aga Khan world of racehorses and South of France topless swimsuits, who wears Balmain dresses and sips Napoleon Brandy.

The record company eventually relented, giving in to appeals from Sarstedt and his producer, Ray Singer. However bosses hadn’t picked up on the strengths of this song. It may have had the same verse-chorus, but that same melody was hypnotic. And the lyric was a heartbreaker, about a woman prepared to abandon the person she loved most in life.

The song was autobiographical, but not quite as the writer indicated on the sleeve notes for his self-titled debut album. "This was written in 1966 for a girl I'd met the year before in Vienna. Everything looked beautiful for us, until, in the summer of '65 she tragically died in a hotel fire. It took me a year to recover and I found myself in Copenhagen waiting for her."

That was a PR line. The truth, he revealed later, was the song was actually about his then girlfriend Anita Atke whom he met in Paris while busking. “It was love at first sight,” he recalled. “She watched as I composed because I was in her room most of the time, so she knows things about me then that others don't. We married in 1969 and divorced in 1974.”

What Atke would have discovered is that Sarstedt was born in Delhi, one of six children to Albert and Coral, civil servant ex-pats in the British administration. When Albert Sarstedt died in 1954, the family moved to south London.

Since both of Peter Sarstedt’s parents had trained as classical musicians it was almost inevitable their offspring would be attracted to music. The three Sarstedt brothers played in a skiffle band while two sisters also played guitar. The Sarstedts were the Partridge Family of their day.

The brothers broke away however, forming a beat group, the Saints, with Richard Sarstedt as the featured singer. Richard went on to become 1960s pop star Eden Kane, and elder brother Clive (Robin) Sarstedt would go on to have a 1976 hit with My Resistance is Low.

However, Peter was determined to have his own success as a singer songwriter. He emigrated briefly to Copenhagen, where he began to write songs in a contemporary folk vein and on returning to London in 1968 signed to the United Artists label. But his first single (with the rather thought-provoking title) I Am A Cathedral, bombed.

Determined to follow a trend for writing “meaningful songs”, he came up with his worldwide hit. “I wanted to write a long extended piece because I was working in folk clubs and universities,” he recalled.

The song worked, capturing the Eurozeitgeist of 1969, feelings of of hippyness and love. But just as importantly it had a huge impact on those British schoolboys who attended folk clubs. As yet unable to grow Sarstedt’s Zapata moustache, they knew if they could create a close approximation of his song, the world (ie local teenage girls) would be entranced.

It has been claimed that Sarstedt was a one-hit wonder (although he did have a further Top Ten single with the nice, sweet song Frozen Orange Juice.)

But even if that accusation were true, how wrong is it to leave behind a legacy that is one phenomenal piece of writing? Yes, Where Do You Go to (My Lovely) wasn’t everyone’s cup of Napoleon Brandy. Film critic Siobahn Synnot reveals the record was once banned by Radio Scotland’s Jimmy Mack Show on the basis of its accordion content and Sarstedt’s forced laugh at the end of a verse.

Stanley Baxter once pastiched the song brilliantly, turning the ‘lovely’ into a fat, hair-curlered tenement housewife who owns only a cheap painting of a racehorse. Yet, Baxter’s version was a tribute to the sheer cultural impact of the song, as was its inclusion in Wes Anderson’s 2007 films Hotel Chevalier and The Darjeeling Limited.

Sarstedt, who made 15 albums in his career, and later toured in Sixties revival shows, knew he had written a classic, if only from the affirmation which arrived every year since recording in the form of a c£60k royalties cheque.

And he deserved it. Anyone who can come up with a great tune, a killer chorus and poignant lyrics which question the essence of identity and asks does it survive has to be rewarded. But if nothing else, Where Do You Go To (My Lovely) reminds us of days when songwriters once wrote songs with meaning.

Peter Sarstedt is survived by his second wife Jill Wall and two children, Anna and Daniel.