emacsclient not working as documented

[Sparky]

Hello all,
I posted this to comp.emacs without any replies, so hoping someone
here will be able to shed some light:

I've been trying to get emacsclient to jump to a particular line and
column of a text file (for use with the Lilypond music typesetting
program) but I can only make it jump to the beginning of a line.
The info page for invoking emacsclient says:

To run the `emacsclient' program, specify file names as arguments,
and optionally line numbers as well.  Do it like this:

     emacsclient {[+LINE[COLUMN]] FILENAME}...

but when I enter:

     emacsclient --no-wait +38:42 music.ly

the cursor appears at line 38, column 1, rather than column 42.

I'm using Mandrake 9.2 and the mandrake emacs packages - emacs version
21.3.1 and emacsclient version 21.3.
Any suggestions would be very welcome, as I'd love to get this working
as documented.

Thanks in advance

Mark