Jan. 9: The complex relationship between Jason Schwartzman (Jack Whitman) and his girlfriend (Natalie Portman) plays out to Where Do You Go To My Lovely? in room 403 of a Paris hotel in director Wes Anderson's 2007 Hotel Chevalier, the prologue to The Darjeeling Limited. As the couple head for the balcony, the music crescendos, giving the city of love and heartaches a touch of 1960s Eurowaltz, which the song's creator Peter Sarstedt once said was "an A-Z of the Eurozeitgeist". Sarstedt, 75, died in the UK on Sunday after a six-year battle with progressive supranuclear palsy.

Decades before the accordion interweaved with the song's timeless line "You talk like Marlene Dietrich/ And you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire", the British singer-songwriter was enjoying "food in Chinatown" and eating "hot gram and sweets" in Calcutta.

"The freedom of Calcutta always gladdened my heart. My two brothers and I ran the streets from dawn till dusk, experiencing the city," he had said in October 2005.

Born in New Delhi, the 1969 winner of the Ivor Novello Award for Where Do You... (alongside Space Oddity by David Bowie), spent his school days at Sherwood College, Nainital and Victoria Boys' School, Kurseong, before moving to England in March 1954.

Calcutta was the place he remembered "most" from his childhood in India. "I was happy there. While I was there, India became Independent. I remember the terrible rioting to which we locked our doors and windows. And, looking back, I can recall injuring my head in a cycle accident in the Maidan."

Yet, everyday was "wonderful" because he and his brothers "flew kites, jumped into and out of trams and garries, played cricket in the park, cycled around, walked through the markets, went to the pictures.... We never knew politics."

Much of his sense of music was, in fact, shaped during his time here. While his dad played the harmonica every night, his parents were ballroom dancers and members of the Rangers Club.

"The backdrop to it all was the music of the street, a soundtrack as it were, all kinds of Indian music, religious, pop, classical, all mixed up together."

Though most have forgotten his other hits - Frozen Orange Juice, Take Off Your Clothes and I'm A Cathedral -Where Do You... will be remembered by us as the song that was number one in the UK in February 1969 but with the man dies the reason behind it.

"This was written in 1966 for a girl I'd met the year before in Vienna. We'd fallen madly in love," he wrote in the sleeve notes of the album. "Everything looked beautiful for us, until, in the summer of '65 she tragically died in a hotel fire. It took me a year to recover and I found myself in Copenhagen waiting for her."