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Some songs don’t stand up to close interrogation. They need you to surrender to the experience, become absorbed in the moment, and suspend your disbelief for the short duration of the song.

Gene Pitney’s 1963 recording of 24 Hours From Tulsa, one of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s inspired compositions, is up there with the best of them when it comes to sheer drama over substance.

The song is actually a letter written to the singer’s wife (we presume – it seems to fit most easily) telling her that he was on his way back home, expecting to be with her, back in her arms, in twenty-four hours. He just needed to grab some shut-eye and something to eat, and he’d be on the road again.

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Meet Mr Leonard Mead. He’s a guy who likes to walk through the city streets at night, striding along the empty pavements, breathing in the cold air.

Even on a dim November evening he leaves his house and sets off, enjoying the good crystal frost, feeling his lungs blaze like a Christmas tree. His shoes push through the autumn leaves that lie thickly on the ground.

Sometimes he stumbles on a clump of grass, because actually, walking isn’t that easy because the cement on the sidewalks is gradually being covered by vegetation. That’s because he is the only person walking on them.

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Guy Clark’s ‘Dublin Blues’ begins with the sublime quatrain:

I wish I was in Austin
In the Chili Parlor Bar
Drinking Mad Dog Margaritas
And not caring where you are

Beat that for a socking great emotional thump. It’s got it all, the homesickess, the short, sharp evocation of a place and a time where you were at ease, at home in your own skin and not tormented by love and longing. It leads you in to the song’s world of broken-heartedness, of asking for forgiveness, of the wealth of experiences which cannot take away the emotional pain.

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The Owl Service explores the easy privilege of the upper class, mixed with questions of nationalism, identity and language and laced with a dollop of teenage angst – what have we got here?

It sounds like a cross between Bullingdon Club themed #Posh and #The Riot Club and the Scottish referendum which has dominated the news for the last couple of weeks, seen perhaps through the eyes of young people encountering the realities of class and power.

In fact, Alan Garner’s award-winning novel was published in 1967. It was classed as a children’s book, in the days before Young Adult became a recognisable genre, but its complexity makes it difficult to categorise.

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You Never Can Tell v I Knew The Bride When She Used To Rock and Roll

The first few lines of Chuck Berry’s You Never Can Tell, written in the early 1960s, strike the tone which permeates the song. ‘It was a teenage wedding.’ Oh yes (sigh) we know about those.

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Cathy Earnshaw from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre from Charlotte Bronte’s eponymous novel are two spirited, rebellious women, both of them passionately in love with difficult, unsuitable men, are high on our list of inspiring heroines.

In teenage years, it was Cathy from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights who fired the imagination. How we identified with brave, fiery Cathy, roaming the moors with her soulmate, driven to distraction when they parted, a wild-eyed victim of love.

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For centuries, the institution of marriage has provided writers and novelists with fertile ground for analysis and exploration.

The pleasures and disappointments, the frustrations and joys of living together under its legally binding yoke continue to be the subject matter for serious analysis, dramatic presentation and frothy fun.

In popular fiction, the landscape of contemporary marriage is laid out in familiar scenes of domestic chaos, demanding children, marital tensions and the impossibility of trying to do it all and have it all. We enjoy identifying with characters and situations which, in part at least mirror our own lives.

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