There's something going wrong around here

When Mrs H and I walk (which we do a lot) we shoot the breeze. Well, as it's the north Wales coast it's usually more than a breeze. And we - OK, I mainly - don't so much shoot it as machine gun it. We cover a lot of ground...

Walking along a promenade a while ago, I interrupted the flow of conciousness to burst into song, or at least I started droning the start of a song lyric:

Pretty women out walking....

Mrs H immediately hissed "Stop it!" as she knows exactly how this one goes:

...with gorillas down my street...

The reason she told me to desist was that the words were clearly apposite and she often warns me my voice travels further than I think.

If you are wondering what this is all about, it's the superb 1979 song by Joe Jackson Is She Really Going Out With Him? which is one of my all time favourites and has a pithy lyric summing up part of the vulnerable male psyche. She can't really be with him, can she?

The song continues:

Look over there (where?)
There, there's a lady that I used to know
She's married now, or engaged, or something, so I am told...

..here comes Jeanie with her new boyfriend
They say that looks don't count for much
If so, there goes your proof

The song has a staccato bass line and feels a bit stop/start like the Stones Honky Tonk Women, a comparison I've only just thought of after 4 decades, bursting into a very singable chorus:

Is she really going out with him?
Is she really gonna take him home tonight?
Is she really going out with him?
'Cause if my eyes don't deceive me
There's something going wrong around here

Released in the New Wave era, Jackson says the song was inspired by the spoken first line of the Shangri-Las Leader of the Pack, although in that case it's female gossip not male angst. It was a slow burn success, failing to chart on first release but later stumbling up to the top 20 in Britain and a few other countries and the top 10 in one or two others. It's one of those songs that has grown more popular, become better known and more widely played on the radio over the years. But the critics loved it straight away: I bought it on the back of one of the Sounds writers saying he'd bought about a dozen copies because he kept giving it away to people, saying he just had to make sure people heard it. (You couldn't just stream it on your phone in those days, youngsters. Sometimes it was easier just to take a punt and buy it). And in due course Jackson got the first of his six Grammy nominations for Best Rock Vocal Performance on the song.

It rapidly became one of my favourites. Indeed, for several decades it would have been my choice if asked for my all time favourite pop single*.

Why pretty women walkdown your street with gorillas was covered in a Roger McGough poem, called Fancy Goods, performed by The Scaffold in 1969. It refers to:

...young ladies...with an eye for the well padded wallet. Or fly...

Which surely must be the answer. Else there's something going wrong around here quite often. Do I hear you say personality, ladies? Do gorillas have personality? People say ugly dogs can have a lovely disposition... 

Nah, he's got to be loaded...

* I think I first asked myself what was my favourite all time single, rather than my current favourite, in 1967. It's a pretty meaningless question at the best of times, but becomes more so, or at least harder to answer, as you get older. Having considered Pink Floyd's See Emily Play and various other candidates from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, I decided the answer at that time was Traffic's Paper Sun, which in turn got displaced by Smokey Robinson's The Tracks of my Tears. Singles became less significant in the prog rock era before reasserting themselves with punk and new wave (and now streaming). For most of the time since 1979 I'd have gone with Jackson's song although sometimes it might have been Bob Marley's Could You Be Loved. 

The last time I gave this question much thought was in the context of @Mikey47 drawing my attention to the Guardian's list of the greatest ever UK number ones, published in 2020. Now everybody else's answer to this sort of question is, almost by definition, risible and that one was compiled by a committee, but the Grauniad flummoxed me by nominating The Pet Shop Boys song West End Girls. Eh?

Mrs H and I put our heads together and with not much anxious thought came up with Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody as a more plausible suggestion, though we both went for The Stereophonics Dakota as our personal choice. That was a number one, Is She Really Going Out With Him wasn't so didn't come into consideration. But what's the answer I would give today if asked to name my favourite all time single (British or otherwise, number one or not)?  I think I need notice of that question.

You can hear Joe Jackson's Is She Really Going Out With Him here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kSlXAeDO08)