When it comes to music, it doesn’t take a lot to make me cry. Marianne Faithfull does it every time with The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan.

I’ve never been able to listen to this song without welling up and sobbing uncontrollably: doubly embarrassing because it’s from the album Broken English and the title track has the same effect on me.

At the time Smash Hits described it, perfectly, as sounding “like Dolly Parton produced by Brian Eno. Only better.”

The first single to be released from Broken English, it’s such a sad song of disappointment and regret, about a suburban woman in her mid-thirties – a wife, a mother – who realises her dreams of a glamorous jet-set life will never be fulfilled.

Marianne Faithfull’s cracked rasp of a voice – husky, sensual, broken but perfectly in tune – set against the relentless throb of Steve Winwood’s solitary synthesiser captures the emotion of the words just perfectly.

As does the knowledge of Faithfull’s real life decline from glamorous 60s star and girlfriend of Mick Jagger into a downward spiral of poverty, anorexia, addiction and attempted suicide in the early 70s, when she was living rough on the streets of Soho for two years.

The final verse, when she climbs despairingly up to the rooftop to bring an end to her suffering, is devastating. 

It’s so perfect for Marianne that I remember being shocked when I found out it was written by Shel Silverstein and originally recorded by Dr Hook and the Medicine Show, whose Sylvia’s Mother is another of those weepie songs.

I really should make a playlist of Songs To Cry To. And maybe I will.