Mark Radcliffe made a happy appearance on Radio 4 last Saturday to take our minds off Christmas panic-buying to tell the story of Pop in Translation. His theme was the thriving industry in translated pop that went on, mainly in the Sixties, whereby singers most comfortable with performing in English recorded versions of their hits for the European market. The reason for this was simple – it stopped Johnny Foreigner doing it himself, possibly better, and in a manner that would deprive the original hitmakers of their performance royalties.

There was an undeniable charm to listening to the Beatles doing I Want to Hold Your Hand or She Loves You in join-the-dots German – but getting both band and translation into the recording studio at the same time was a process not without its problems.

George Martin, who tends to come out of most Beatles stories as the one who stopped everything going down the toilet, says that he told the Fabs to be at the EMI studios to record German versions of their platters. But they weren’t keen on stepping away from their native tongue and, when the time came for the recording, they didn’t show. So Martin and the German language expert (ie, a German) he had hired went to the hotel where they were staying and when Martin burst in “they fled,” according to Martin, “to every corner of the room. And all there was left was Jane Asher, pouring tea.

“And there was this mophead in the corner of the room and I went over and said: ‘You really owe this fellow [pointing at the German] an enormous apology. Now, say you’re sorry.’” That’s the way to talk to a Beatle.

Germany was a particularly important market for British bands – put simply, unless the song was in German, the locals wouldn’t buy it. But, rhyme and metre being not terribly compatible between one language and the other, a certain amount of fudge went on. The first verse of Sie Liebt Dich, for example, translates as: “You think she only loves me?/ Yesterday I saw her/ She only thinks of you/ And you should go to her.”

There was a certain grisly fascination to hearing Lulu sing her Eurovision classic Boom Bang-a-Bang in French – it seemed to make more sense, somehow – and Petula Clark turned out to have enjoyed the process so much that she married a Frenchman.

But by far the strangest bit concerned the Italian version of Space Oddity, which David Bowie recorded while blissfully unaware that his lines: “This is ground control to Major Tom/ You’ve really made the grade / And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear / Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare” had found new life as: “Tell me, lonely boy, where are you going to?/ Why so much pain? You’ve lost without doubt a great love/ But the city is full of loves.”

More oddity than space, then.

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