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Such Good Friends, Synth-Pop Song

Posted: 8 September, 2026 | Category: Mainly Composition Category: Mainly Performance

This video was created by Martin Ley in 2026, inspired by Jenni’s song recorded in 1992.

Composed and sung by Jenni Roditi ©1974.
Guitar and backing vocals performed by Jenni Roditi
Keyboards, programming and sound engineering by Martin Ley.
Jenni’s singing lip-sync filmed and directed by Roland Denning.

Words, chords and melodic line: Jenni Roditi © 1974.
Martin Ley ℗ Recording copyright owner
Martin Ley: Artwork ©️ Martin Ley, 2026

It is a song about a friendship I had between 1968 and 1971 when in Primary School. JR September 2026.

Link to Spotify for the audio track

Such Good Friends: lyrics

1. When I first saw you again

I didn’t know you through my sleepy eyes

You woke me up without a feeling

As you came in the room, you cried

CH “Jenni, I’ve come to see you again –

Remember how we used to be such good friends?”

2. When you first told me your news

I felt so precious and so cold

You say they’re coming to take you back inside
(original words: You say there’s a chance of 50- 50)*

It’s much worse than it used to be – little orphan child!
(original words: Of getting three years in a ‘Community Home’)*

CH “Jenni, I’ve come to see you again –

Remember how we used to be such good friends?”

MIDDLE SECTION

You move me, you move me

I know you manipulate your own solitude

But I was motivated by your indifference, and your wit

But my concern for you was all in vain

You never listened to a word I said with any real intent; you said..

CH “Jenni, I’ve come to see you again –

Remember how we used to be such good friends?”

3. You stayed for tea and then for supper

My family always welcomed you

You didn’t trust any of us

All you trusted was our past

CH “Jenni, I’ve come to see you again –

Remember how we used to be such good friends?” (CH repeats)

You smiled, and then you went …..

*The song contains two lines (verse 2, lines 3 and 4) that were not used in this recording but were reframed for the purposes. I am happy with both versions. The original words for those two lines expose something that is more veiled by the new words. For the puposes of truthfullness and because they reveal more about what my friend was going through in the 1970s I have added them in brackets beneath the lines sung in the recording. Below is an explanation taken from Claude AI about line 4, verse 2, followed by the full backstory about the friendship.

The original words: what was a ‘Community Home’?

ME: to Claude AI: Was there such a thing as Community Homes in the 1970s?

Claude AI: Yes. “Community Homes” were a real category of institution in the English child welfare system, created by the Children and Young Persons Act 1969, which came into force on 1 April 1971.

The reform that created them

Before 1969, residential provision for children and young people was split across separate systems:

Approved Schools (run by voluntary bodies or local authorities, but under Home Office oversight) — for young offenders and children on care/protection orders
Local authority children’s homes — for children removed from home for welfare reasons (neglect, family breakdown, etc.)
Various voluntary/charitable homes

The 1969 Act tried to end this split by merging virtually all of this provision into a single unified system called “community homes.” The idea, in line with the era’s welfare philosophy, was to stop treating young offenders and children in need of care as fundamentally different populations requiring separate institutions, and instead bring them under one child-care umbrella run by local authorities (with some homes still “assisted” by voluntary organisations, under local authority regional planning).

Structure

Within the community home system there were, broadly:

Community Homes with Education (CHEs) — the former Approved Schools, on-site schooling, generally for older children/young offenders. These absorbed the old approved school population. In the early 1970s, the approved schools were merged into the social services system and became community homes with education Christianwolmar
Community Homes without education — smaller residential homes for children in care for welfare reasons, children attending local schools

Homes were coordinated regionally: Children’s Regional Planning Committees were set up and devoted most of their energies to the role of the CHEs, and a DHSS seminar in 1973 projected regional need for thousands of residential places across all types of community home. ThetcjThetcj

Decline

The system didn’t last as originally conceived. Until the early 1970s the care population included many young offenders placed in residential homes by the courts, typically for two years, but the focus on alternatives to custody in the 1969 Act itself led to a decline in the use of community homes with education for that purpose — and this was reinforced later by the Children Act 1989, which removed care orders as a sentencing option for young offenders altogether. Use of residential care fell from 32% of the care population in 1978 to 21% in 1986 to just 9% by 2010/11. Publishing ServicePublishing Service

A darker chapter

Worth flagging: the 1970s–80s community home system, including CHEs, is also the period at the centre of many of the UK’s historic institutional child abuse scandals and later inquiries (e.g. North Wales, and various local authority reviews). If that’s part of what you’re researching, I’m happy to go into that history too — just let me know the angle you’re working from (e.g. a specific home, region, family history, or the policy/abuse-inquiry side).

Would it help if I pointed you toward primary source material — e.g. the National Archives has policy files and inspection records (series BN 74, BN 61, BN 29) on individual homes, and there’s a dedicated site (childrenshomes.org.uk) that catalogues individual community homes by region if you’re trying to trace a specific institution?

Written by Claude AI.

Backstory: Such Good Friends

Such Good Friends from 1992 will be available across all streaming platforms on Thursday, 4th September 2026!

“Such Good Friends” is a guitar song I wrote as a teenager, sometime in the mid-1970s, not long after a reunion with a childhood friend, I’ve called “Lucy” here. I was always writing songs, and it was natural to pick up the guitar, especially when a difficult or intense feeling was hitting home. I was starting to experiment on the piano with instrumental music too, taking more risks. This song, though — perhaps the most conventionally formed of anything I wrote at the time — has travelled with me all these years. Even now, it feels like it happened yesterday in my heart.

Lucy and I met at primary school when I was about seven. She lived in a children’s home just up the road from me, and we walked to and from school together most days, between the ages of seven and ten. She was bright as a button and carried more anger and hurt than any child her age should have to. My family welcomed her often — she’d stay for tea. And I’d go to the children’s home too and have tea there with her and the rest of the kids.

When we moved on to secondary school, we drifted apart the way school friendships often do, and I lost touch with her for a few years.

Then, out of the blue, one day she turned up at my house and walked into my room, unannounced, without knocking. It had been three or four years since I’d last seen her. “Jenni,” she said, “I’ve come to see you again — remember how we used to be such good friends?” It was a typical kind of Lucy double-bind, leaving me helpless as to what to say next. Those words became the song’s refrain, and its title, for this release, though the original title was “Delinquent.”

For this recording, I not only softened the title, but also some of the original lyrics of the second verse. It now sings, “You say they’re coming to take you back inside — it’s much worse than it used to be, little orphan child.” I had to dig back into my memory to remember the original words on these two lines, which ran: “You say there’s a chance of 50-50 of getting three years in a Community Home” — the real institutional term for children’s homes in England at the time. I think she may have been trialled as a foster child for a few years after leaving primary school. Looking back, both choices — the stinging verse about the Community Home and the loaded title — were part of my adolescent rawness and needed softening for this recording, but I think it’s important they’re noted here. I was glad I was able to recall them, word for word, over three decades after the recording was made, and after five decades since composing the song.

Sometime in the late seventies or early eighties, another friend who also knew Lucy and me decided to find her. We tracked her down to a mental institution near the Tavistock Clinic in North London, heavily medicated. We sat with her in a bare room — just two chairs and a table, walls painted a flat peach colour, nothing to make it feel like visitors were welcome. She sat on the table; we sat on the chairs. We were there for maybe forty minutes. She still had that sparkle, still had that giggle — but she wasn’t in a great place.

The timeline of this song flows through my life — from 1968, through the three-year friendship we had, the reunion as teenagers, the revisiting as adults, the recording at the beginning of the nineties, and the release of this song in 2026.

The song follows a simple structure: verse/chorus/verse/chorus/middle section/verse/chorus/chorus/coda/end, yet, it seems to me, the middle section shows a rather unique development of the very simple material, together with the storyline and the chorus, being a direct quote from Lucy; it just worked. I composed it quickly, in one sitting. I remember one friend in particular who just couldn’t stop singing the chorus — she found its mood ran deep.

I want to thank Martin Ley for remembering me, after all these years, and for putting his time into bringing this song to the world over the last week or so. We’ve had fun collaborating on it.

Martin and I would like to dedicate this song to Lucy.

She’s stayed in my heart. Singing this song for the lip-sync was an emotional experience, and many memories and feelings came flooding back during the session.

Martin and I would like to thank Roland Denning for his generously given time in filming for the lip-sync.

Jenni Roditi, 2.9.2026.