Why Olivia Newton-John will always be my first date.... and how it all started in Brighton

It seems a little bit of a footnote in musical history that it was Olivia Newton-John who represented the UK in Brighton in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest when Abba so famously stormed the Dome with Waterloo.

Singing Long Live Love, Olivia secured a respectable fourth place for the country of her birth.

Her time was yet to come – and it wasn’t long in coming.

Grease, four years later, made her a star around the world as the shy-girl turned rocker, vacationing Australian student Sandy Olsson who meets and falls in love with John Travolta’s bad boy Danny Zuko in the summer of 1958.

There are plenty of people who insist there was a straight line between her (relative) Eurovision success and Newton-John getting the Grease role. Others will insist there is no such connection at all, but clearly, at the very least, the Eurovision exposure can only have been a good thing.

Plus the fact there was perhaps a natural transition.

Look at the YouTube videos of Olivia singing If Not For You back in 1971, and Sandy Olsson is clearly just a few short steps away.

The self-conscious smiles, the slightly awkward-dancing, the general air of innocence about to awaken… it’s a gorgeous video, not least for the fact that is it a superb version of a great track (the only cover of the Dylan song to come remotely close to George Harrison’s definitive cover of it).

In hindsight, girl-next-door Sandy seemed a hop and a skip away, and when she duly stepped into the limelight, we all fell in love with her.

Which makes her passing all the more poignant for anyone who lived through the 70s – and grievously overinterpreted her invitation to ‘Let’s get physical’ in the 80s.

For countless thousands of us, Olivia Newton-John will always be our first date. She was certainly mine.

Grease, you have to remember, was a proper cinematic event. So much so that its arrival at our local Ritz emboldened me to ask… well, I had better not say her name… out on a date.

Astonishingly, the girl of my dreams said yes. I called for her; her father answered the door to check me over, apparently half-approved and then waved us off as we walked the mile to the flicks.

The trouble was I couldn’t think of a word to say to her. More Sandy Olsson than Sandy Olsson herself, I squirmed in my sweet innocent bashfulness, thinking ‘Oh well, once we get to the cinema, we will have something to do.”

Watch the film.

And watch the film we did. I assumed an air of intense concentration to mask the fact I didn’t have a clue what to do or so. The film ended.

“Did you like it?”

“Yes. Did you?”

“Yes.”

And so we walked back in silence. And sat in her kitchen in silence until her father put us out of misery.

“Would you like a lift home?”

“Yes, please,” I squirmed.

And that was the end of a relationship which never had the chance to become beautiful. I remained Sandy Olsson, never getting the chance to enjoy the rocker transformation that Sandy eventually got to enjoy.

It is awful to think that she has now gone, and so young too – such a precious part of our youthful dreams and awkwardnesses.

And looking back, it was all wrong anyway, wasn’t it. Why on earth did she have to dress up in leathers and change completely to impress slightly-shallow supercool Danny? Shouldn’t he have met her half-way? More than half-way, in fact? Was she really so wrong in being so shy and uncertain?

But the lovely thing is that it is John Travolta’s tributes to her now which are by far the most touching.

"We will see you down the road and we will all be together again,” he wrote, signing his message “Yours from the moment I saw you and forever! Your Danny, your John.”

Quite a few of us felt that way…