'Jennifer, Alison, Philippa Sue.... doh!' Neil Diamond in 1972. Photograph: Rex Features
Unsurprisingly, I've always had a soft spot for the song Sweet Caroline, Neil Diamond's 1969 tribute to a girl with the best name in the world. Anyone whose name is part of a song title must feel that same mini-jolt of pleasure at the thought of being thus immortalised, even if the tune was written about some other Caroline or Sandy or Katie. This week Diamond revealed, nearly 40 years after the fact, that his particular Caroline was President Kennedy's daughter, who would have been 11 when she inspired some apparently ambiguous sentiments in the songwriter, who was 28 at the time. I'm disinclined to believe that Diamond was moved by anything other than innocent admiration, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, now 50, has said she's flattered.
But does she also feel a bit disconcerted by the fact that she now has to accommodate Diamond/Sweet Caroline in her life somehow? The bond between them is reinforced by the fact that the song was a million-selling single and is still popular in America, and now she'll never be able to listen to it again with the same insouciance as the rest of us Carolines.
But at least she's not Sharona Alperin, a California real estate agent whose burden is to go through life knowing that the Knack's Doug Fieger was thinking of her when he wrote the lines "Never gonna stop, give it up, such a dirty mind/Always get it up for the touch of the younger kind." The song, My Sharona, was a massive hit in 1979, and she has to live with its snickering lechery forever. Then there's the "Delilah" of Plain White Ts' current hit, Hey There, Delilah, which was penned in the hope of persuading said lady to date singer Tom Higgenson. The fact that he'd gone to such lengths failed to move her, and she declined, but Higgenson's had the last laugh: the hapless Delilah is destined to spend the rest of her life trailed by a song she never asked to be written. And WHAT a song - winsome and doe-eyed, it's uncontestedly the most irritating hit of 2007.
Have you ever had a song written about you? Or been tempted to write one about someone else under the assumption that it was the quickest way to their heart, or - as with John Lennon's nasty little dig at Paul McCartney, How Do You Sleep? - to rile them?
