Le Banana Split by Lio (1979)

Jacques Duvall and Jay Alanski wrote Le Banana Split for Lio when she was sixteen, modelled on the Ikettes' Peaches and Cream, and the French press has called its register an érotisme gourmand: cherries like lipsticks, whipped cream collapsing in an avalanche, and a banana chanted by a teenage girl while a yeti serves. The music is new-wave disco pop, bright and silly, which is how two grown men's idea of a dessert got past everyone.

It went to number one in France at the start of 1980 and sold somewhere between 700,000 and a million copies depending on who is counting, and it has remained Lio's signature record through covers by Kim Kay in 1998 and Sandra Lou in 2004. Lio herself has since distanced herself from it, saying lyrics like these helped normalise the sexualisation of young girls, a judgement the page records rather than argues with.

Its afterlife is the argument about who the joke was on. The song is the French Les Sucettes of its decade, an adult's innuendo placed in a teenager's mouth, and it sits on this list for the "banana" while carrying the same footnote France Gall's "lollipops" do. The yeti has not commented.