n 1985 two bitter rivals from the world of Original Cast Recordings collaborated on a magical number from the soon-to-be world famous musical Chess. Putting it into a modern context, this audacious move of pairing two high-flying rivals from the same musical world (but very different continents) would’ve been like getting Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain to rock out together. At the time this coming together of Barbara Dickson and Elaine Paige (or Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson depending who you were down for) was like the coming together of two powerful but dissimilar chemical agents; one the raw Celtic brunette forged in the fires of folk and the other a posh London town blonde. The combination, as I’m sure anyone who has heard the track will attest to, was like a dawn jungle napalm drop.

Thinking back to that other great “I want him, no he’s mine...get your own” double act of Brandy and Monica, I can’t recall being really convinced about who deserved or even wanted ‘the boy’ the most. In fact, didn’t it end up with neither of them caring all that much and going off together?

The way I remember it, Dickson played the once doting and now annoyed Russian wife (with appropriate Red October Connery style Scots accent) and Paige was the long-suffering American mistress. The song managed to tackle the issue of showing both sides of the story from these women in love and the points of view of their possibly extant relationships with a self-centred chess champion; a situation that I’m sure a lot of ladies out there can sympathise with.

Let’s be brutally honest for just a second: I think most of you reading this have probably joined me some time in the past in scrambling to reach for the dial whenever this has been played on one the UK’s beloved dreadful commercial radio stations. Those opening plastic toned piano notes are a testament to the melodic ear of ABBA’s Benny & Bjorn who sold their jumpsuit wearing asses to the man instead of concentring on winning back the hearts of Agnetha and Frida. And even though it was only number one for about four weeks in the UK, my parents liked this song enough for me to have been able to memorise not only the complete lyrics but also the exact intonations of each line. May God forgive them.

As the world already knows, Benny and Bjorn had both had spiteful splits from their more glamorous ABBA partners, but a lesser known fact is that lyricist Tim Rice was also going through the beginnings of a divorce during the Chess writing period. Listening to the majority of “I Know Him So Well,” you could be convinced that the song was nothing more than a particularly well-crafted love song. But within the song is a kernel of hate, all three of the song’s creators wanted the woman of the world to feel something of what they had felt in their darkest hours.

When, in the closing seconds of the song, Paige moans how that “And in the end he needs a little bit more than me, more security” and Dickson states that “he needs his fantasy and freedom” they’re both speaking Rice’s words. Rice is letting the female of the species know that whatever they do, they won’t ever be able to fully satisfy their man. Of course mistresses are already aware of the rickety nature of their duplicitous relationship, as are wives who find that tell-tale extra sim card (the noughties version of lipstick on his collar) in their husband’s wallet. But Rice’s barrel was aimed at those safe-as-houses housewives who might’ve thought twice as those closing lines endlessly circle the radio waves (even now). He was hoping to put a sliver of doubt in every woman’s heart, a shard of ice in every relationship in suburbia. Using a backing track that is unarguably cheesy and reeks strongly of those nasty 80s keyboards and fake orchestration, he laid his trap.

Tim Rice: the most evil man in your parent’s record collection.