One-hit wonder went off the rails in a haze of drink, drugs and car crashes

Even by the standards of Tin Pan Alley, ‘‘I love your chinny, chinny chin’’ has to be one of the least distinguished lines in the lexicon of disposable pop lyrics. Yet it was enough to make a star of Abi Ofarim, who went to No 1 around the world in 1968 singing Cinderella Rockefella with his wife, Esther Ofarim.

Beginning with him singing, ‘‘You’re the lady/ You’re the lady that I love,’’ and her answering, ‘‘I’m the lady, the lady who . . .’’ the song was a novelty of irresistible banality, with a faux yodel and, as one critic put it, lyrics of ‘‘immaculate Euro-gibberish’’ that sounded as though they were ‘‘written by someone who learnt English from listening to Radio Luxembourg’’.

As annoyingly catchy as such Eurovision behemoths as Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String and Cliff Richard’s Congratulations, Cinderella Rockefella had every irritating attribute to make it the perfect Eurovision entry – except that the Ofarims were Israeli and the song was composed by a pair of American writers from The

Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

However, Abi and Esther were actually Eurovision veterans, having been hired as mercenaries to perform the Swiss entry T’en va pas (Don’t Go) at the 1963 contest, although Abi was reduced to accompanying his wife anonymously on guitar and backing vocals. When the votes were tallied, the couple believed that Esther had won, only for Norway to change its vote and hand victory to Denmark.

Abi was promoted to sharing joint billing again when the couple sang Cinderella Rockefella on the BBC’s Top of the Pops TV show. Wearing a ruffle shirt and sporting sideburns, he went all cross-eyed as he crooned: ‘‘I love your eyes.’’ In return, the kaftan-clad Esther blinked big saucer eyes at her husband as she sang: ‘‘I love your touch.’’

It was goofy, but safe enough for them to sing it for the Queen at a Royal Variety Performance. According to Abi, when the duo were presented to the Queen, she asked if he had been in the army, to which he replied: ‘‘Yes. And you?’’

Cinderella Rockefella made the Ofarims the only married couple other than Sonny and Cher to top the pop charts but, as so often with novelty songs, it proved hard to follow. The bizarrely titled One More Dance (Your Husband Is Worse) scraped into the charts in the summer of 1968 on the coat-tails of

Cinderella Rockefella. Yet essentially the Ofarims were a one-hit wonder.

They toured the world, but by 1969 the couple had separated and Abi had begun an affair with the German actress Iris Berben. The Ofarims never performed together again and, although Esther went on to enjoy some solo success, Abi’s life went off the rails in a haze of drink, drugs and car crashes, a journey that he later chronicled in a memoir appropriately titled The Price of the Wild Years.

He was born Avraham Reichstadt at Safed in Galilee, in what was then the British mandate of Palestine. After the birth of the Israeli nation in

1947, he attended ballet school and made his stage debut in Haifa in 1952. He had his own dance studio by the time he was 18, then was called up to serve in the Israeli army at the time of the Suez crisis and the Sinai war.

He met 18-year-old Esther Zaied in

1959 at an Israeli theatre club, where she was singing Hebrew folk songs and he was employed as a dancer. On their marriage two years later, they adopted the stage name Ofarim, which translates loosely as ‘‘fawn’’.

With Abi arranging and accompanying for her, Esther won the Tel Aviv song festival in

1961 and the next year supported Frank Sinatra on his first tour of Israel, during which he allegedly made a pass at her. Seeking success on a wider stage, the couple left Israel in 1963 and settled in Geneva and subsequently in Germany, which caused some controversy in Israel, where radio stations for a time banned their records when it was reported that they had given a concert on Yom Kippur. There were further problems when Abi was impersonated by a fraudster.

After his divorce from Esther in 1970, he accused her of egotism and snobbery in interviews, and in 1979 he was arrested for possession of narcotics and tax evasion. He spent a month in prison and a year on probation.

It was the wake-up call he needed and, after cleaning up, he married Sandy. The marriage ended in 2004, but he is survived by their two sons, Gil Ofarim, who leads the band Zoo Army, and Tal Ofarim, who is also a musician.

After being taken to hospital with pneumonia in 2017, he recovered and was able to return to his home in Munich to celebrate his 80th birthday and update his fans on Facebook.

‘‘The last few months have been hell,’’ he wrote. ‘‘But I have received so much love and energy from you all that I am speechless and grateful.’’ – The Times