I recently found a note I made last year about "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr. James." I first heard the song via this live version on Beat! Beat! Beat!:
Videos from this performance were uploaded to Manfred Mann's YouTube channel in October 2019 but were taken down on copyright grounds. In August 2021, however, they were uploaded to Beat-Club, which apparently owns the rights. An exact date (18 November 1966) was given when the videos were on Mann's channel, but Beat-Club provides just the year.
In any case, I think that even from the first time I heard the song, I noticed that "away" in the line "As your life slips away, yeah" is sung with a melisma (D D C# E G), providing something of a sense of movement.
Last year, I realized that there's a contrast between the fixedness of "Hanging things upon the line" and the movement of "your life slip[ping] away," although, obviously, one is literal, and the other is metaphorical.
