Songfacts®:

• The title track of David Essex's third album, the lyric touched on the singer's Irish Traveller Jack-the-Lad ancestry and his role as Jimmy McLean, a heartless fairground Romeo in That'll Be The Day:
  
  Greasy hair, eyes of black that coldly stare
  The fairground king, lord of the rings
  He, steal your kiss
  Lifting your soul with a tattoo'd sigh
  
  "A lot of my relations on my mum's side and I used to work in the fairgrounds and they always interested me," Essex confided to Circus. "Jimmy McLean was a perfect part for me. That was one of the weirdest things ever when I got the script for That'll Be The Day."
  
  "I'd actually worked on the Dodgems, I worked on the Whip, and what interested me about fairs — and still does — is that kind of scarey-but-good atmosphere," he continued. "There's a menace there, there's a danger in the fairground, in the midst of all the whiteness and colored lights and amusements. Just around the corner is this underlying violence."