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It's the defining moment of any arena rock concert. The front-man (or woman) points his mic towards the crowd, and they carol back the words of some great chorus with joyful abandon.

But more often than not, the words they sing are “la la la”.

I stumbled across the newly reconstituted Suede on Jules Holland the other day, and listened to the absurdly youthful Brett Anderson doing one such “la la la”. Sadly the tune wasn’t up to it. The rule is: you only add a “la la la”, if the music is tuneful enough to sustain it. Otherwise, get your pen out and write some lyrics instead.

We have been singing “la” since the very origins of the musical scale. It’s there in the oldest folk songs and central to what they technically call “solmization” or “solfege”.

In pop, however, it’s an invitation to share and participate, the moment when a song takes leave of its argument and loses itself in swaying emotion.

I think it was in 1968 that the “la la” chorus embedded itself in popular music, and it happened on both sides of the Atlantic. On one side Paul McCartney turned Hey Jude into the longest single in history, by inviting everyone to join in a four-minute fade-out.

On the other side of the pond, Paul Simon was making a similar move in the closing choruses of The Boxer. One was a “la la la”; the other was a “lie la lie”. We never did speak the same language.

It’s curious that one of the most literate and cerebral of songwriters should enter a lyric-free zone like this. Simon subsequently admitted that his chorus was meant to have words, but that he couldn’t come up with any. It was the laziest best decision in pop history.