In this week of national mourning I feel compelled to join everyone else in singing the praises of Cilla Black, who supplied the soundtrack to a large part of my life.

Just 12 when she crashed into the charts with Anyone Who Had a Heart, I loved this powerful Burt Bacharach/Hal David ballad, not realising at the time that its arrangement was largely ripped off from the less successful version by Dionne Warwick.

Warwick’s recording reached number 6 in the US at a time when the chart was dominated by the great British import (and Cilla’s principal mentors) the Beatles, at numbers 1, 2 and 3 respectively with I Want To Hold Your Hand, She Loves You and Please Please Me.

My preference, though, was for Cilla’s second number one, You’re My World, despite the famous foghorn effect with “your HAND resting in mine”. This spent ten weeks in the charts and reached the American top 30 too. Cilla was destined never to make the top 20 stateside.

Favourite of all, though, for this teenage pop picker was her take on You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, infinitely preferable, I thought (and still think), to the overblown production from the Righteous Brothers, which hit the top spot on both sides of the Atlantic.

From the oeuvre of Phil Spector (who wrote it with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil) the song continues to be played, along with his other hits, on BBC Radio 2, from which the likes of Gary Glitter, Jonathan King Rolf Harris are firmly excluded. Murder, for which Spector was convicted in 2009, is a less heinous offence for the Beeb than sexual molestation.

Ever a great trouper, Cilla was a huge draw in 2010 when she played the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella at Aylesbury’s new Waterside Theatre, which she opened in October of that year.

She deserves a footnote in the history of British pantomime, incidentally, for re-establishing (for a time) the tradition of a female principal boy with her Aladdin at the London Palladium.