Is she really going out with him?

The first line, spoken, from the Shangri-Las song "Leader of the Pack". Roughly twelve years later, singer Dave Vanian asked the question again at the beginning of "New Rose" by The Damned.

When it appears in a pop song, the phrase invokes the feeling of romantic yearning prevalent in the girl group songs of the mid-1960s.

Also a song by Joe Jackson on the album Going Undergound from 1979, although it was rereleased and did rather better in 1982 on the coat-tails of his bigger success, Steppin' Out.

Any song which begins with the line "Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street" can only be a work of lasting genius.

The actual lyrics are relatively familiar to anyone who has noted the array of retarded anthropoids that attractive women frequently surround themselves with, but the obvious humour and the blatent savagery of the music (this is not a chord-structure you'll find repeated far beyond the original punks of the seventies) lend the song originality and it could be argued, status as an underappreciated classic.

Note that while the music is harsh, this is controlled and extremely deliberate. Jackson's subtlety as a composer is far better illustrated in this three-minute single than in all his later rhapsodising and the prog rock-esque synth work he gave us throughout the Eighties.