Pete Sinfield, lyricist for King Crimson, Bucks Fizz and Greg Lake, dies

Lake, who died in 2016, was also in the original line-up of King Crimson and the pair worked together on Lake’s surprise solo Christmas hit.

“I had no expectations of it becoming a hit record at all,” Sinfield said in 2014.

Speaking decades after writing the song, the pair differed over what it was about.

Lake said: “The magical Christmas we had both known as children had over the years somehow deteriorated into one huge marketing exercise and we decided it would be a good idea to write a song that resisted this decline in the hope the magic could somehow be restored.”

Sinfield said: “There wasn’t a sudden revelation of finding out Father Christmas didn’t exist, but it happened in 1951 or so when I was seven or eight.

“My parents were divorced and it was tied up with a loss of innocence – finding out that I didn’t have a normal family.

“The people surrounding me were all my mother’s friends.

“Our German house-keeper kept up the spirit of Christmas and then suddenly it was taken away from me at the age of eight when I was sent off to boarding school.”

Although in was kept off the top spot in 1975 by Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, Sinfield said radio station plays every December meant it kept him in royalties that he estimated were about £20,000 a year.