Radio 2's Pick Of The Pops yesterday (rolling)

It's a fine record, especially in its 12-inch version when that off-centre label/warped synth goes moderately crackers. But Love Action or Sound Of The Crowd it ain't.

This may or may not be true.

(actually, it is true)

I bought nos 9 and 8 of this top 10 (8 was a remix, 9 was a single double pack)

Worse, I've kept them all.

(xpost)

20. Bruce Ruffin - Rain
Used to hear this all over the place. The ludicrous George Chisholm trombone raspberries are yet another example of Johnny Arthey's bizarre "Willesden Sound" arrangements for Trojan, but not as bad as Ruffin's "Mad About You" upon which he overdubbed a Punch and Judy puppet.

19. Fame and Price Together - Rosetta
Roset-TA are you bet-TA are you WELL WELL WELL? They were on the Two Ronnies every bloody week.

18. Neil Diamond - I Am, I Said
"Now I'm not a man who likes to swear." "I am, I said/To no one there." Descartes meets Sondheim halfway up the Brill Building. Genius.

17. T Rex - Hot Love
Beginning of time, part 1.

16. Arsenal First Team Squad - Good Old Arsenal
In the year of the double. "Rule Britannia" with different words (i.e. "Good old Charlie" etc.). Dale did not comment on the attendant irony of playing it when he did. Nick Hornby must have bought it.

15. Andy Williams - Where Do I Begin (Love Story)
Loathed the film but what a record, what a performance. Lovely.

14. Sakkarin - Sugar Sugar
Jonathan King does heavy metal Archies. Sounds unsettlingly like Lordi.

13. Gerry Munroe - It's A Sin To Tell A Lie
Blimey I'd completely forgotten about this Opportunity Knocks-winning John Shuttleworth lookalike! Sort of a cross between Frank Ifield and Vic Reeves' club singer. Whatever became, etc.

12. Severine - Un Banc, Une Arbre, Une Rue
Monaco's '71 Eurovision winner. Sounding remarkably like 80% of this year's Eurovision entries.

11. Free - My Brother Jake
...which, when I was a kid, I always thought was about the kids' puppet series Sally And Jake. You didn't miss anything.

10. Diana Ross - Remember Me
One of that curious string of melodramatic MoR ballads in Gordy's continued attempt to turn La Ross into Shirley Bassey. I thought "Surrender" far and away the best of that bunch.

9. McGuinness Flint - Malt And Barley Blues
I loved "When I'm Dead And Gone," but this was a very dull follow-up, and consequently charted lower.

8. Elgins - Heaven Must Have Sent You
At the moment, for private reasons, one of my favourite records ever; another (1966) Dave Godin/Twisted Wheel resurrection job, and quite rightly so.

7. East Of Eden - Jig-A-Jig
How much of this stuff would even come within a mile of today's Top 100, never mind the top ten? Bizarre folk-free-jazz-rock fusion which I thought was a mightily avant-garde single to have in the charts, but then I heard Hot Rats and realised that it was a complete crib of Sugarcane Harris' solo on "Gumbo Variations." Never mind - I still love it!

6. Waldo de los Rios - Mozart 40
Ah yes, popular classics with a gentle easy listening beat, the sort of thing Radio 2 was actually playing at the time instead of the stuff they're now pretending they played.

5. Dave and Ansell Collins - Double Barrel
Beginning of time, part 2.

4. Ringo Starr - It Don't Come Easy
The greatest Beatle solo career begins in earnest. What a fucking terrific pop record. Apparently originally offered to Cilla Black - ?????????????????

3. R Dean Taylor - Indiana Wants Me
Something you'd expect from Curt Boettcher or Gary Usher rather than Motown; mournful and melodramatic on-the-run/crime-of-passion number with multiple puncta of police sirens, gunfire and "This is the police, you are surrounded" voiceovers at the end. Wasn't RDT a lost visionary? Only three major hits and all classics.

2. Rolling Stones - Brown Sugar
Even then I felt severely pissed off that this didn't get to number one. You know - if you're going to do this sort of thing, this is the way to do it. Brilliant, catchy and genuinely sexy.

1. Dawn - Knock Three Times
Bloody pre-Beatles leftover/Engelbert bandwagon jumper with his ultra-creepy stalking song. "Read how many times I saw you." POLICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think either "Hot Love" or "School's Out" was when I started taking an interest in the charts more or less fulltime.

With good reason, IIRC...when "Don't Let It Die" came out there was a sort of "mystery artist" hype placed on it. Many people thought it was the guy who played Alfie Hall on The Clitheroe Kid! Terrific record, though.

The next day, John being nice, told Norm that they couldn;t use it as they didn't have a Ringo song, and that's what they were going to do to complete said album.

(Not told in the book: The conversation between Paul and john where John says "you are joking la")

Good for him is what I say. A DJ with a mind of his own - very rare these days.

20. The Move - California Man
Excellent if clearly transitional record; not quite the Move, not quite ELO and not quite Wizzard, but none the less glorious for it. "Take it Jeffrey!"

19. The Moody Blues - Life Is Strange
Seldom-revived track which sounds uncannily like Barafundle-period Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.

18. The Temptations - Take A Look Around
Minor balladic entry in the '70s Temps/Whitfield canon; quietly menacing in its paranoid doo-wop, but not one of their best.

17. Jo Jo Gunne - Run Run Run
Who were these people? You heard this all the time on '70s Radio 1, but what else (if anything) did they do?

16. New World - Sister Jane
Op Knocks winners; weren't they Australian? Also the least-remembered act on the Chinnichap roster. What a strange record this is: starts off like the Seekers and then this Chicory Tip/Moroder electro riff comes in. All about running a woman out of town because she's "fallen in love again." Charming.

15. Paul Simon - Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard
Reminds me of that dreadful old Cadbury's Dairy Milk advert of the period with Cilla Black doing the voiceover. "Goodbye Rosie, the Queen of Corona." Yes, thank you, Paul, we'll let you know.

14. Procol Harum - A Whiter Shade Of Pale
Reissued for no evident purpose. Was 1972 at a loose end?

13. Marmalade - Radancer
Still having hits in 1972...remarkable...unlike the actual record, you understand...

12. Lindisfarne - Lady Eleanor
Weird how, when I started university in 1981 and was expecting dozens of musically hip 'n' kool students, I found most of them still to be listening to James Taylor, Cat Stevens and LindisBastardFarne. Made me ask several unheard but key questions about tertiary education.

11. Don McLean - Vincent

10. Leeds United Football Club - Leeds United
Attendant irony, part 2: "We're out to toast each other from that silver cup."

9. Primal Scream - Country Girl
Just kidding, it was "Tumbling Dice" by the Stones. Or am I?

8. Drifters - At The Club/Saturday Night At The Movies
Reissued for no evident purpose.

7. Johnny Cash & the Evangel Temple Choir - A Thing Called Love
In my mind, JC is always associated with summer holidays in Blackpool, the warm wind refracting off Central Pier, the kids' cartoon cinema, Pink Panther pink chocolate. Most shops we passed seemed to be playing this or "Boy Named Sue" or "What Is Truth?"

6. Hurricane Smith - Oh Babe, What Would You Say?
Exquisite. The kind of record which, though deliberately retro, you don't mind insofar as its retro-ness in a roundabout way works in its favour. Also it reminds me of being a kid, in a good way. HS was the missing link between Syd Barrett and Julian Cope - produced Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and turns up playing trumpet on Kilimanjaro.

5. Elton John - Rocket Man
Hmmm, Watford five places above Leeds United...

4. Vicky Leandros - Come What May
'72 Eurovision winner. Sounds uncannily like the '82 Eurovision winner (the verses are nearly identical).

3. The Pipes & Drums & Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards - Amazing Grace

2. David Cassidy - Could It Be Forever?
Ooh, lovely helplessness. First UK solo hit and some luscious lead guitar from Larry Carlton. Kim Carnes and Jennifer Warnes did the backing vocals.

1. T Rex - Metal Guru

All in all, a less interesting Top 20, and a noticeably more rockist one, than that of May 1971.

Jo Jo Gunne were half of Spirit weren't they? Jay Ferguson and Mark Andes? Jay Ferguson wrote some great songs with Spirit but I don't think he did anything very worthwhile after Spirit.

What a great song this is tho

20. Freddie and the Dreamers - I Love You Baby
Paul Anka cover version. "As I walk by the schoolyard..." - maybe not, sadly-missed Freddie, eh?

19. Kathy Kirby - You're The One
Never quite knew what to make of Kathy K; something of a throwback to the Anne Shelton/Joan Regan school of bellowing balladry. The orchestration on this (Ivor Raymonde) is so demented it virtually drowns her voice out.

18. Gigliola Cinquetti - Non Ho L'Eta Per Amarti
'64 Eurovision winner, and thanks to my mum, a record I've known all my life. From the Francoise Hardy can't-really-sing-but-quite-cute-in-her-vulnerability school of song delivery.

17. Lulu & the Luvvers - Shout
Lulu does Alex Harvey doing the Isley Brothers. Following Kathy Kirby and Gigliola Cinquetti it sounds like Sonic Youth.

16. Billy Fury - I Will
Ah me, poor Bill, the one Brit rocker who was for real (yes I know, Johnny Kidd, Vince Taylor, but...) and all Decca did was drown him in pipe-and-slippers ballads like this one. Sings the song far better than it merits.

15. Searchers - Don't Throw Your Love Away
This was the New Thing? It sounds so annoying polite...

14. Bachelors - I Believe
The Westlife of their day wobbling through that bloody song again (only good version is the one sung by Phil Minton on the Solid Gold Cadillac Brain Damage album, complete with romantic electric sax obbligato by George Khan).

13. Jim Reeves - I Love You Because
The one Ken Dodd turned down.

12. Mary Wells - My Guy
Hallelujah - a record which actually sounds like 1964 instead of 1924! Another of my current all-time favourite records, again for private reasons (it's always the way with Motown...). The beginning of time, part 1, obviously.

11. Hollies - Here I Go Again
You said it.

10. Dionne Warwick - Walk On By
The end of time, part 2. According to Dale, rush released in Britain to avoid Cilla covering it.

9. Fourmost - A Little Lovin'
Oh fuck OFF, fucking Frank Rogers And The Spotty Dogs Out Of Brookside Knees Up!

8. Brian Poole & the Tremeloes - Someone, Someone
Dry run for "Silence Is Golden," more or less. Definitely less.

7. Millie - My Boy Lollipop
The first big Jamaican crossover hit, and therefore probably the record with the greatest overall long-term influence in this list. Bit too Little Jimmy Osmond for my taste, though.

6. Chuck Berry - No Particular Place To Go
Again according to Dale, this wasn't selling until he came over and appeared on Thank Your Lucky Stars, and then it took off. Good job, too - in this context it sounds like Merzbow!

5. Shadows - The Rise And Fall Of Flingel Bunt
Hank and the boys try to toughen up a bit, and inadvertently show up all the Merseybeat lot for the ghastly pale cabaret acts they really were.

4. Cliff Richard - Constantly
...unfortunately, no one bothered to tell their boss...

3. Four Pennies - Juliet
Yeucch. A B-side that was flipped over, sadly not onto a sticky frying pan. Didn't the singer go on to present Play School?

2. Roy Orbison - It's Over
Is this tomorrow, or just the end of time, part 3.

1. Dale's Great Personal Mate Cilla - You're My World
"I feel a power so divine." That'll be Graham Norton's record collection, then.

So there you go...lots of drippy ballads, and three of the greatest singles ever made...

If you think that's bad, you should hear "I found out the hard way" for badness.

Points for "trouble is my middle name" though.

Yes: Lionel Morton, for it was he. Talking 'bout MY generation!

20. O.C. Smith – Son Of Hickory Holler’s Tramp
Good gracious, authentic(ish) Southern Soul in the mainstream charts. How did that get through?

19. Jacky – White Horses
The TV theme, and it still moves me, not just because it makes me think of being a kid again but because of the song’s delicate despair; it’s all about escaping from a dead life into a fantasy of hope, and no there’s no evidence to suppose that “White Horses” was meant in the Laid Back/Goldfrapp sense.

18. Marmalade – Lovin’ Things
Their first hit, very much in the Love Affair mould with the same production team (Mike Smith and Keith Mansfield). Oddly fragile performance, with singer Dean Ford seeming perpetually on the verge of tears.

17. Herman’s Hermits – Sleepy Joe
No I can’t remember how it went either, and Dale didn’t play it. Perhaps it had naughty lyrics.

16. 1910 Fruitgum Company – Simon Says
Marred for me by being the constant soundtrack to primary school PE classes where we had to do the actions or else.

15. Tremeloes – Helule Helule
Trying to get a belated hold of the Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich market by the sound of it. The equivalent of the Sweet in their “Poppa Joe”/”Co-Co” period.

14. Equals – Baby Come Back
13. Des O’Connor – I Pretend
12. Louis Armstrong – What A Wonderful World/Cabaret
All three were past or future number ones and illustrate the yawning and bemusing aesthetic gap between the two schools of 1968 chart-toppers. Of them, the Equals record is by far my favourite.

11. Scott Walker – Joanna
Well well well. Why is “Joanna” the most important record in Walker’s career? Because without it The Drift would probably have been afforded the same gratuitous 150 words in a slow week as, say, the new AMM or Evan Parker record – we are fascinated because once he was like this; up there with Engelbert and Solomon King and John Rowles, and even if he only did the record to pay for Scotts 2 and 3, his delivery is immaculate and heartfelt. Note also the lyrical overlap with “Copenhagen” from Scott 3 – “You made the man a child again.”

10. The Herd – I Don’t Want Our Loving To Die
Frampton and co’s credibility went out the window with this, their biggest hit, but in retrospect it’s like the Bonzos doing bubblegum – Master Singers intro, cardboard bongos, school recorders in the instrumental break, even a Scott Walker pastiche. Quite berserk, in its own polite way.

9. Dionne Warwick – Do You Know The Way To San Jose?
Over the weekend I heard “It Never Rains In Southern California” on the radio, and for the first time it struck me how desperate a song it really was under its coating of AoR gloss. “Don’t tell them where you found me – just give me a break.” “San Jose” is something similar; a rueful homecoming following a future which was never going to happen. One of Bacharach and David’s most barbed songs, and one of their most misleadingly chirpy tunes. Therein lies their genius.

8. Donovan – The Hurdy Gurdy Man
Croaking through a shortcircuited Leslie cabinet, sitars going wrong, a startlingly aggressive lead guitar (Jimmy Page, wasn’t it?) – still the most disturbing of Donovan’s hits, and one of three instances of complete and total malevolence in this chart of pop.

7. Don Partridge – Blue Eyes
The Sandi Thom of his day, except he was for real – a Tottenham Court Road one-man-band busker who carried on being as such after the hits. Quite a jolly record, not that I would ever be driven to listen to it again in my life.

6. Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and the Trinity – This Wheel’s On Fire
See what I mean about absolute malevolence. Beginning of time, obviously, and another indication of the surprising hold that Dylan had on the charts of ’68 at one remove (think also of the Manfreds’ “Mighty Quinn,” and Hendrix’s “Watchtower”). Julie’s vocal is possibly the coolest female vocal performance ever, in all senses of the word.

5. Love Affair – Rainbow Valley
Same subject matter as “San Jose,” and another record which makes me feel sad for lives gone; Steve Ellis’ voice marvellously vulnerable on this.

4. Engelbert Humperdinck – A Man Without Love
When in Glasgow, I marvel at the fact that there are radio stations like Clyde 2 and Saga who still play this kind of stuff as a matter of priority. Sometimes I wish there were similar ones in London, if only as an option. Very, very camp but actually quite a wonderful record, of its kind, whatever that means.

3. Bobby Goldsboro – Honey
Oh, please…an unwanted missing link between “Old Shep” and Lou Reed’s “The Bed” where the singer patronises his lamented Other – he might as well be singing to, or about, a dog – and it’s little wonder that she topped herself, just to get away from him.

2. Rolling Stones – Jumpin’ Jack Flash
An end of time, I guess, but note how this song is the negative image of “Hickory Holler’s Tramp” at the other end of the list.

1. Union Gap – Young Girl
This record has always given me the creeps. God knows whether anyone listened to the lyrics while dancing to it.

the great unanswered question where the 1968 charts are concerned is: how different would they have been had it not been for the Marine Offences Act? where would Aretha Franklin's post-MOA records other than "I Say A Little Prayer" have peaked? where would "Grazing In The Grass" and "Tighten Up" have peaked in the UK? what about all those other US hits we never got here?

against my better instincts, I found myself rather liking "Helule Helule". though that was probably because it was on a compilation my parents used to play when I was about five.

An anagram of last week’s list; this week in June 1986:

20. Patti Labelle & Michael McDonald – On My Own
The famous record and video where the two singers never actually met.

19. Janet Jackson – Nasty
“GIMME A BEAT!” – literally, the beginning of time. Sounds as though it were made in a different century from everything else in this chart – the 21st.

18. Miami Sound Machine – Bad Boy
Rather tacky sounding sub-pop from So Brave Gloria immediately prior to her purple patch.

17. Genesis – Invisible Touch
Collins’ “yes” in the chorus “she seems to have that invisible touch, yes” still irritates the hell out of me.

16. Jaki Graham – Set Me Free
Terrific and gorgeous singer, imaginative songs and production (Derek Bramble – even though the usual technical limitations meant that the records sometimes came across as a Happy Shopper Jam and Lewis); so who fucked up? Ah yes, the British music industry.

15. Pet Shop Boys – Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)
Startling moment on BBC2’s The Culture Show this week with Morley doing a 25-year overview of MTV. “David Cameron pretends to like the Smiths because of MTV.” Cut immediately to a terrifying, enraged camera stare from Morley, who thrusts the off switch on his remote control as though it were a sabre.

14. Owen Paul – My Favourite Waste Of Time
Sadly being reclaimed by the Guilty Pleasures mob – no, you’re wrong, it was rubbish 20 years ago and is worse than that now. I don’t care if Marshall Crenshaw did write it.

13. Lovebug Starski – Amityville (The House On The Hill)
The sort of rap record I’m almost sorry they don’t, or can’t, make any more; the missing link between Bobby “Boris” Pickett and Cypress Hill. Great William Shatner. Impersonation.

12. Housemartins – Happy Hour
That bit in Morley’s Ask where he mentions that the music industry allows no more than three “new” acts to break through in any given year.

11. Bucks Fizz – New Beginning (Mamba Seyra)
Unfortunate title for their last hit (also their first single on Polydor – whoops, there goes the A&R man through the fourteenth floor window) but still a fine single and nearly the last great production by Andy Hill, once the pretender to Trevor Horn’s crown (the last being his contribution to that epic multi-single Sudden Sway project which only Dr C and I are likely to remember, or indeed have bought).

10. Falco – Vienna Calling
His other hit. The flute makes it sound like Jethro Tull gone Europop, but nowhere near as interesting as that.

9. Amazulu – Too Good To Be Forgotten
‘80s production at its worst – airless, over-trebly, every cheap-sounding Woolworth’s synth note in its right place, unable to breathe or flow, horrible, top five with a bullet.

8. Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer
“Wacky” video revives fading old fart’s career, part 1.

7. Real Thing – Can’t Get By Without You (The Second Decade Remix)
Oh FFS.

6. Robert Palmer – Addicted To Love
“Wacky” video revives fading old fart’s career, part 2. In 1976 this would have been a Vinegar Joe B-side (so would “Sledgehammer”). But: “Oblivion is all you crave,” and the record seems to have carried a curse, with both RP and video director Terence Donovan going on to die young. Kim Gordon’s numb record booth recitation on the Ciccone Youth album gets to this song’s non-existent heart a lot quicker.

5. a-Ha – Hunting High And Low (Re-Mix)
Now this is the difference between artisan and artist; producer Tony Mansfield lets the song and record breathe, flow and develop quite magnificently. And it’s a proper song with proper construction, progression, coda and ending! Brilliant; but dumb Dale played the album version and not the single remix with the string section.

4. Simply Red – Holding Back The Years
Yes, I recognise that Hucknall’s a bit more intelligent and probing than the Tom Jones and Rod Stewart who preceded him in this particular lineage, that this song is a sort of Mancunian equivalent of Hawley’s “Coles Corner,” that his phrasing and timing are immaculate, that the song is the nearest his group came to walking as it talked.

But the “mater/pater” rhyming scheme continues to annoy me intensely, and…I just don’t like his voice. I see the improvisational similarities to Tim Buckley, with a touch of very early Leo Sayer added…but I keep thinking of the NME of the mid-‘80s, and Red Wedge and Real Music Not Plastic Cocktail Crap and can’t get beyond that. Not with Simply Red.

3. Nu Shooz – I Can’t Wait
This is really the belated last of the old-style disco records, a fairly direct descendent from Andrea True Connection and Silver Convention with added Fairlight whoops and Art of Noise-ish bangs. And it’s one of the great singles of its, or any, decade, even if only because of Valerie Day’s gorgeous, sympathetic but frequently deadpan vocal performance – and here’s the lesson to everybody post-Mariah; sometimes minimal and deadpan counts for much more, emotionally, than shrieking through the scales. Very, very sexy, as indeed was she, as for that matter was her name – Valerie Day, sigh – but beyond that, it’s fantastic, a great one-off (though the Poolside album must be snapped up next time you see it in the charity shop).

2. Wham! – The Edge Of Heaven
A slightly over-trying attempt to go out with a big bang – Elton John turns up on organ, if you’ll pardon the expression – with a lyric which seems to be all about, to put it less than mildly, S&M (check out that first verse especially). Of course the song’s sequel was “Fastlove.” But the real goodbye comes on the B-side, with George Michael’s careful reading of Was (Not Was)’s “Where Did Your Heart Go?,” a song which helped usher in New Pop, and now the song which will help to bury it. The long instrumental fade suggests a goodbye of subtly terrifying finality.

1. Doctor & the Medics – Spirit In The Sky
Again the thing you notice immediately is how sterile and cheap the ‘80s production sounds even in comparison to the Greenbaum original (which didn’t exactly cost a fortune); it sort of stands there, yellow and inert. And those horrible synth horns are the death of any music.

Yeah, I got all eight in one shrinkwrapped package at a record fair. Tapedit, sold it. Played it again, about a month ago. Better than I remembered. But not great. Interesting, though.

20. Scott Walker – Lights Of Cincinatti
It’s a tribute to Scott that he could address maudlin by-the-yard MoR like this with exactly the same dedication and care which he gave to the other songs he was writing and recording at this time, “30th Century Man,” “The Seventh Seal” and “Get Behind Me” among them. The song owes something to both “Twelfth Of Never” and Dvorak’s New World, but listen to Walker’s immaculate phrasing (“willows” and “pines” in particular) with its near-perfect balance of technique and emotion and the spell lasts long enough to make you think you are listening to a work of art. “Pictures of a life that used to be” indeed.

19. Andy Williams – Happy Heart
Hooray for good old-fashioned pop records which weren’t afraid to stop or start or pause! “IT’S!” (pause) “MY!” (pause) “HAPPY heart you hear/Singing loud and singing clear/And it’s all because you’re near me, my love!” It’s wonderful and so is good old Andy; the record makes me want to dance down hills in the sunshine (definitely one for Parliament Hill Fields in August, I fancy).

Again the question is begged: why can’t we have this kind of straightforward, unambiguous, friendly kind of pop any more? I looked at last night’s TOTP, with its Roosters and its Jamie Foxxes frantically attempting to be more than pop (because they’re actually ashamed of pop?), all trying to be fucking cool. Andy Williams never had to try; he just was…and is.

18. Beatles with Billy Preston – Get Back
Ah yes, I’ve just remembered why we can’t have that kind of straightforward, unambiguous, friendly kind of pop any more. It was largely their fault, wasn’t it?

17. Chicken Shack – I’d Rather Go Blind
A good illustration of the gulf of difference between American and English emotion as expressed in music. In her original recording, Etta James is fevered, frantic, desperate in her attempts not to lose her Other. But the artist formerly known as Christine Perfect keeps her head, sings with head-down restraint but with ineradicable emotion; she simply doesn’t need to make a song and dance about it. Really Christine is the Joanna Lumley of pop, isn’t she; effortless and always warm in her politesse, but with a tiny little edge which suggests a proliferation of colourful accessories in her bedroom cabinet.

16. Four Tops – What Is A Man?
The Tops just pip the Temps to the post of Motown as social commentary. A typical vocal performance of angst-laden bravado from Levi Stubbs; but really you have to experience the incredible ten-minute extrapolation on the same song recorded by the Watts Prophets the following year.

15. Family Dogg – A Way Of Life
One of my personal favourites of ’69, because despite the group’s willowy folky-pop appearance (as I recall from dim TOTP memories) they were the New Seekers with paranoid knobs on, and there is a palpable sense of threat throughout this hypnotic overlay of multiple chants, rhythms and homilies (“Don’t forget you’re a long time dead,” for instance) which found its full and unexpected flowering in their bizarre, avant-MoR pair of albums A View From Rowland’s Head and Sympathy – very much Britain’s Spanky and Our Gang. And that recurring piano figure throughout can’t help but make me think of the Shortwave Set, their true heirs.

14. Crazy Elephant – Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’
“Annoying little record, isn’t it?” said Dale in a rare burst of outspoken criticism, and he wasn’t wrong either; can’t fathom how this got anywhere near the charts – a standard, low-wattage attempt at garage bubblegum which was obviously attempting a “Mony, Mony” but falling woefully short, like a lemming trying to leap to the top of Everest.

13. Jackie Wilson – (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher
Ah, this is much more like it; a record I never get tired of hearing, and lyrically very pertinent to The Way Things Are Now (with me, at any rate). Exultant in the “Happy Heart” sense and a typically knockout vocal from the great JW.

12. Peter Sarstedt – Frozen Orange Juice
His other hit, and by far the better one; glow in the little harp arpeggio following “this fantastic day,” like a bottle of San Pellegrino cracking open. Unpretentious, perky but panoramic in a slightly more popist Donovan way. “You rescue me, I rescue you”…oh yes.

11. Cliff Richard – Big Ship
Oh dear. “Love’s like a big ship a-followin’ me,” breathes Sir Clifford as though it were still 1962, accompanied by some preposterous French horn bleats – big ship, see? See what they did there? – and a third verse which ranks among the worst verses in all of pop. Talk about running out of ideas in relation to a metaphor which never had much mileage in it to begin with!

10. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles – The Tracks Of My Tears
Such elegant anguish! From Marv Tarplin’s opening, Mayfield-influenced guitar motif to the depth of the Miracles’ low harmonies and finally through Smokey’s most politely tormented vocal performance – the punctum of this masterpiece lies in the contrast between the agreeable, relaxed flow of the musical surface and the violent emotional conflict raging beneath, all coming to a head with that syllabic fusillade of end-of-an-affair cannon fire: “My! Smile! Is! My! Make! Up! I! Wear! Since! My! Break! Up! With! YOU!”

God, there was some good stuff in this chart.

9. Creedence Clearwater Revival – Proud Mary
Marred for me in my youth thanks to Tom Jones’ absurd bellowing of the same song on his TV series, but the original remains untouchable (even Spector’s maximalism – check out the Checkmates Ltd. cover - couldn’t match Fogerty’s ebullient minimalism). If you’re going to go back to basics, this is how you should do it, though note the little nod to psychedelia in the sitar-like guitar break.

8. Beach Boys - Breakaway
By 1969 they couldn’t get arrested in America, were playing state fairs in Texas and nursing homes in Leeds…and yet as a recording act the Beach Boys’ popularity was undiminished in Europe, and in Britain in particular. Look at their UK singles chart record from 1966-70 and if you didn’t know any better, you might wonder what all the fuss was about breakdowns and fire engines. “Breakaway” was nearly the last thing they cut for Capitol and it’s an ostensibly unassuming but very clever production. In the States it died like a louse in a Russian’s beard, and Al Jardine went on to complain about Brian’s production “underselling the record’s ending.” But in Britain it was as big a hit as anything they’d ever done.

7. Thunderclap Newman – Something In The Air
Forget the broadband adverts, this is what a number one single once meant: an absolutely unambiguous call to revolution (“Hand out the guns and ammo”) interspersed with a Willie “The Lion” Smith boogie-woogie piano interlude, which in turn leads to a final key change which is as moving as anything in pop, because we already know the revolution’s doomed. Speedy Keen and Jimmy McCulloch RIP; Andy Newman ‘phone home.

6. Tommy Roe - Dizzy
Six million copies sold worldwide, according to Mr Winton; to echo the eximious Paul Anka, I don’t get it…I. Don’t. Getit. Exceptionally weedy production for American pop in ’69.

5. Elvis Presley – In The Ghetto
It shouldn’t work, really, should it – what would mega-rich Elvis in his mansion know about the ghetto? Yet the record works, because the mansion is darkened by his own shadows, because he seems to be singing only to himself – the vocal is low and inward-looking throughout – and because of Jimmie Haskell’s spellbinding, other-worldly string arrangement. And also because you couldn’t imagine that the man who began this decade by crooning “It’s Now Or Never” could end up singing this, and like this.

4. Booker T and the MGs – Time Is Tight
The Top 40 rundown music, for those of us who are that age, and a great little record – note how Cropper’s clipped guitar and Al Jackson’s ambiguous on-the-beat beat suggest an imperceptible nod to bluebeat, and also how Jones’ organ connects it to the last remnants of psychedelia.

3. Jethro Tull – Living In The Past
Don’t know whether Ray Davies ever got the royalties for those “You Really Got Me” flute quotes but it’s another superb pop single with a nicely barbed lyric from the future salmon farmer which works as either Grumpy Old Man nostalgia or ironic commentary on the futility of doing what the title suggests.

2. Edwin Hawkins Singers – Oh Happy Day
“Unexpected” and “unusual” hits? These charts are full of them. I can’t remember how or why this impeccable piece of undiluted gospel got to number two in the Britain of 1969 (can’t imagine it getting anywhere in the Britain of 2006, unless diluted with Ronan Keating, or similar). Magnificent, of course; a subtle call to arms beneath its air of joyous salvation, and Bobby Gillespie was obviously listening (“my light shines on” as it would be).

1. Beatles – Ballad Of John And Yoko
Their last number one, and really just John and Paul jamming as though it were still Hamburg in ’61; also acts as the first chapter in Lennon’s ongoing pop-single-as-proto-blog project. Meanwhile, on the B-side, “Old Brown Shoe,” George invents Morrissey.

Harrison later claimed to have used Oh happy day as the inspiration behind My Sweet Lord.

That is quite clever.

I wonder if anyone has ever heard it without knowing about Elvis's life. I suppose not. Pity really.

I think it might be in my all-time top ten.

This week we had the chart from 2 July 1975, which is possibly one of the worst charts there has ever been. Looking and listening through it you are reminded exactly why punk – or anything – had to happen. If there were ever a Make Do And Mend chart it’s this one.

20. Roy Wood – Oh What A Shame
The first of a surprisingly high proportion of this chart which Dale didn’t play. Not that you’d have missed much; this severely underwhelming pub rock boogie plod was an extremely disappointing and muted last hit for the otherwise great man.

19. Rubettes – Foe-Dee-O-Dee
Scarcely a year on from “Sugar Baby Love,” one of the great number ones despite itself, and the Rubettes had been reduced to lame “Tiger Feet” ripoffs. I recall a radio interview where one of the Rubettes claimed that the band took bets in the studio as to exactly how bad the lyrics to their next single would be. When this one came around the eye-rolling was endemic. But, stalwart session players that they were, they gritted their teeth and got their fee. No wonder that piano solo sounds so bad tempered.

18. Donny and Marie Osmond – Make The World Go Away
The first of two Osmond singles in this list, a reminder that they were still (if only just) having hits in 1975. Donny and Marie were now the main priority, but this lachrymose C&W cover sounds exactly like “Morning Side Of The Mountain” which sounded exactly like “I’m Leavin’ It All (Up To You)”; thus it wasn’t long until the TV series where she was a little bit country, he was a little bit rock ‘n’ roll, with its “hilarious” sketches.

17. Nazareth – My White Bicycle
Dan McCafferty and the boys seem to have been on a mission to reduce every piece of music to smelly hard rock sludge. No matter whether it was Joni’s “This Flight Tonight” or the Big O’s “Love Hurts,” they all ended up sounding the same; thus it was with this traduction of the Tomorrow psych classic. Here the guitar break also invents Dunfermline’s other, less fortunate sons Big Country.

It is, however, still infinitely better than the version recorded by Neil Out Of The Young Ones.

16. Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel – Mr Raffles (Man It Was Mean)
I’d gone right off the man after the split of the first CR, and that overrated and overplayed number one of this. Dale didn’t play this, but its plodding tunelessness remains stuck in my memory like an irremovable Johnson’s cotton bud.

15. Pete Wingfield – Eighteen With A Bullet
Singles based on music industry in-jokes traditionally didn’t do well in the British charts – think of 10cc’s “The Worst Band In The World” and the Raspberries’ “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)” – but the future Dexy’s producer cleaned up in both Britain and America with this fusillade of would-be white soul Billboard Hot 100 double entendres. Faintly attractive at the time, but in the end bloodless.

14. Gilbert O’Sullivan – I Don’t Love You But I Think I Like You
Another one Dale omitted, much as the artist himself omitted it from his recent Berry Vest Of compilation. An inferior “Get Down” retread and a heart palpably not in it; this was his last British hit for five years.

13. Kenny – Baby I Love You, OK
And Dale passed over this one as well. Shows you what he thought of this chart. Anyway, a deeply unpleasant sub-Glitter Band stomp, and as I recall Kenny’s only function appeared to be as a clearing house for all the Martin/Coulter songs the Rollers didn’t want.

12. Wings – Listen To What The Man Said
Macca reaching his Venus And Mars/Speed Of Sound sunny MoR plateau, and if recorded by anybody else this would long have been considered a classic. Unassuming but cleverly constructed with its synth bass and soprano sax curlicues, and then you realise that the whole song is a set-up for the gorgeous turnaround ending where the record glides to a halt, the strings come in and the mood changes to romantic autumn.

11. Osmonds – The Proud One
The old Four Seasons song and the last top ten hit by any Osmond, though doubtless a major contributory factor to the birth of at least some of Westlife.

10. Mud – Moonshine Sally
Their last RAK release, and if I recall correctly not an official Mud single as such. It wasn’t on the chart for long and sees the band trying hard not to sound like Mud. The fuzz/psych guitar and stentorian, building-block vocals suggest a kinship with early Sweet.

9. Chi-Lites – Have You Seen Her?/Oh Girl
Double A-sided reissue of two hits, then just three years old (which speaks volumes about the quality of this chart). Dale opted to play “Oh Girl” for a change, which reminded me of the uselessness of barriers; beneath Eugene Record’s exquisite vocal, the harmonica and Nashville piano flourishes sound as though they strayed in from a George Jones session.

8. Gary Glitter – Doing Alright With The Boys
You will scarcely be surprised to hear that Dale not only didn’t give this a spin, but referred to the title as simply “Doing Alright.” As GG did it, strictly speaking, with the girls, he could have a case for libel. But you can guess what the song sounds like anyway, without ever needing to hear it (again) (ever).

7. Showaddywaddy – Three Steps To Heaven
The old Eddie Cochran song, blandly done and accompanied by a ghastly “comedy” routine on TOTP. Oddly enough, they sound like Mud.

6. Hamilton Bohannon – Disco Stomp
One of only two singles in this chart which give any thought to a “future,” “Disco Stomp” still sounds quite staggeringly ahead of its time – the minimal, utilitarian vocals, the subtly flowing rhythms (suggesting South African hi-life with those guitar/bass right angles), the patient key changes, the robotic place name recitations (particularly the atonal “NEW YORK CITY” towards the record’s end). Graceland meets Philip Glass meets “I Zimbra” – all ahead of schedule.

5. Ray Stevens - Misty
The best Ray Stevens record, I think, since it works as modest humour (Erroll Garner goes Nashville) and also as a straightforward reinterpretation, thereby avoiding the rest of his bipolar repertoire of dismally unfunny novelty hits and sanctimonious bilge like “Everything Is Beautiful.”

4. Windsor Davies and Don Estelle – Whispering Grass
Now here’s a thing, and not just because it’s the second pre-rock song to appear in this top five – Dale apologised profusely, both before and after this record, for playing it. So even he is afraid of being crucified by the Cool Police. He shouldn’t have apologised at all (as opposed to most other Radio 2 DJs, who should be made to apologise 700 times per programme for the aural torture they inflict). Nor did he mention the sitcom from which this record sprang – presumably the Cool Police have now banned him from doing that as well (come on, it was a billion times funnier than Dad’s Army, ADMIT IT!).

3. Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony – The Hustle
An absolutely central and key record in the history of dance music – and particularly in the history of gay disco – and 31 years on it sounds like the theme from The Love Boat. Says a lot about the immortality of pop, eh?

2. Johnny Nash – Tears On My Pillow
Not the old Little Anthony and the Imperials song. It starts oddly too, as though halfway through – we get half a verse of straight soul balladry before it suddenly turns into reggae. This did go to number one, but wouldn’t “I Can See Clearly Now” have been a far better candidate for that position? Sung beautifully, as was Nash’s wont, but rather dull.

“I think you’ll agree that this chart has truly been a voyage of discovery,” quipped Winton at this point, barely concealing his steamroller irony. It really is a Mr Byrite chart, isn’t it? Full of leftovers, a Top 20, most of which has never been revived in the intervening three decades. What ghastly concoction could possibly have topped this chart?

1. 10cc – I’m Not In Love
Er…one of the greatest number ones ever…I’ll get me coat…

The follow-up single "Letting Go" was the first new single release by any former Beatle not to make the UK Top 40.

"Disco Stomp" is indeed phenomenal - I rediscovered it about three years ago, and became somewhat obsessed for a while. I always visualise the entire dancefloor jumping 90 degrees to the right upon each key change...

Possibly. I vaguely recall Ringo's "Goodnight Vienna" being issued as a single in early '75. I could be wrong about that, though.

I'm fairly certain "Goodnight Vienna" wasn't a single. "Oh my my" might have been though.

In this thread, this is the first list to predate me, so my unreliable second-hand memories are based purely upon when Jimmy Savile used to play the same charts in his Double Top Ten Show three decades of Sunday lunchtimes ago.

20. Roy Orbison - In Dreams

Would we think the same things about this song, even without foreknowledge of Blue Velvet, of the psychosexual father figure revealing himself, briefly but indelibly, as the film's true infant? The struggle to find a compromise between idealised wishes and cold rationalist reality was rarely expressed more fervently than by the Big O; his '60s catalogue represents one of the most titanic of such struggles, a battle so exhausting in its passion that he must have known he was systematically shortening his life with every song he sang.

He already knows the futility of the exercise in the opening gambit of "the candy coloured clown they call the Sandman," is fully aware that the battle is already lost ("I close my eyes," he sings as though closing his teeth, his lungs, his mind) before steadily working his way up to hysteria, via the scarcely sustainable "a silent prayer" where he sounds like Atlas about to drop the planet on his back and shatter it into fevered fragments, to the final, ghostly, searing "ON-ly" - he loses and he burns, but like Tom the cat, always miraculously extricated himself intact for the next single; the Sisyphus of pop, patiently awaiting to repeat the same emotional bloodbath, knowing it is his destiny.

19. Brian Poole & the Tremeloes - Twist And Shout

This week in 1963, the Beatles' Please Please Me was enjoying the ninth of its 30-week run at the top of the album charts (it was eventually displaced by, er, With The Beatles). But their beginning-of-time take on "Twist And Shout" was not released as a single in Britain; thus Decca continued to try to compensate for turning them down 12 months previously by getting the Trems in to do a quickfire cabaret carbon copy cover (and thereby give them their first hit). Note how Poole has to lower the song's key by a full octave, so we can hardly expect the equivalent of Lennon stripped to the waist at the end of a straight 12-hour recording session, his throat shot to pieces but screaming "Twist And Shout" as though the world depended on it. Nevertheless it did peak at number four, just like David Parton's version of "Isn't She Lovely?"

18. Kenny Lynch - You Can Never Stop Me Loving You

In case you'd forgotten, or wondered, what exactly he was supposed to be famous for, other than 18 holes on the green with Tarby and Brucie and Ronnie Corbetty and General Pinochety, Lynchie did knock out some half-decent pop-soul hits in the early '60s, though this one seemed to have more than half an eye on the Billy Fury market (Lynch's best disc was the nearly forgotten late Britfunk classic "Half The Day's Gone And We Haven't Earned A Penny" - from 1983!).

17. Searchers - Sweets For My Sweet

Again and again, with Merseybeat groups trying it with American soul, one gets the feeling of children playing at being adults. Compare the Drifters' original - congas, sex, wit - and the Searchers' unrelenting pallidity, and you realise that in the case of some bands, their influence is more interesting than any music they made.

16. Billy Fury - When Will You Say I Love You?
15. Bobby Rydell - Forget Him

Like the Big O, Fury's voice had the power and natural authority to transform any piece of schlock, no matter how glutinous - as with the absurd Ferrante and Teicher piano cascades which needlessly decorate this song - and make it matter, convey the illusion that the song is at the centre of his world. Such a pity that Decca ended up giving him virtually nothing else save schlock.

By the time of his death in 1983, it should be recalled that Fury was on the verge of a major comeback; his records had gained him at least a toehold on the charts again, but his final, posthumous single was a slow and appropriately elegiac reading of "Forget Him"; a far more apposite interpretation than Rydell's annoying bouncy pullover of a record.

14. Billy J Kramer & the Dakotas - Do You Want To Know A Secret?
13. Beatles - From Me To You

The difference; Kramer is worthy but workmanlike, while the Beatles, from the opening harmonica/guitar/vocal fanfare, convey urgency and lifeblood. It really was them and no one else as far as Merseybeat was concerned, wasn't it?

12. Crystals - Da Doo Ron Ron

The obligatory "sounds like the future" record, but my goodness does it, especially in this company; rock and roll as Kubrick might have known it. One of Hal Blaine's finest moments, too; those tsunamis of drum rolls in the fadeout.

11. Roy Orbison - Falling

The second Big O entry in this chart, since "In Dreams" was one of his biggest British records (it was on the lists for 23 weeks), and a less revived, since more complex, song, but its architecture is equally compelling, beginning with the single ticking cymbal and arching upwards to its tortured close - only Orbison could stretch out the word "you" over eight syllables and make it sound like Prometheus having his lungs ripped out, with his anguished breath of the word at the end.

10. Elvis Presley - (You're The) Devil In Disguise

A clear war between the old (rock and roll "devil") and new (ballad "angel") Elvis. The latter won, ensuring half a decade of trashy films and forgettable film themes masquerading as pop records.

9. Lesley Gore - It's My Party

Still of the old school of teen angst compared to "Da Doo Ron Ron" but Quincy Jones' production does give early notice of his soon-to-be-sublime use of space.

8. Freddie & the Dreamers - If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody

Why do I instantly think of the Housemartins (and their "Caravan Of Love" in particular)? The James Ray American original was a rather raw R&B ballad; but Garrity and the boys did it as an epileptic Mancunian trot with some bizarre percussive harmonica and an always well-mannered, if bloodless, voice. Yet they make no attempt to copy the delivery of the original; they're doing it their way, and in a way that's kind of admirable, if unlistenable.

7. Wink Martindale - Deck Of Cards

The second of three separate chart runs for this Godhead perennial (the first was in 1959, and the third in 1973, in direct competition to Max Bygraves', ahem, interpretation). Pretty sickly taking Vietnam And All That into account, though I tend to think of Bill Oddie's parody of the song on I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again: "There are four suits, which reminds me of Bob Monkhouse's wardrobe" etc.

6. Jim Reeves - Welcome To My World
5. Ray Charles - Take These Chains From My Heart

Old and new country, and not necessarily in that order. Reeves epitomised what Nashville wanted to be - aspirational, upmarket, smooth, not necessarily anything to do with country's ragged and supposedly shameful past (compare the average Billboard country chart positions of Reeves and Cash at around this time and see what I mean), possibly the C&W equivalent of the Philly Sound.

Whereas Uncle Ray's take on Hank bleeds, eats right through those chains straight to the song's original heart - who else could give that triple wail of "cha-ai-ains" near the end of the song, as though he's sidling out of them even as he sings? Note also the lovely duality which occurs in the piano break, when the orchestra disappears and we're suddenly left with a lovely little Erroll Garner salute. Genius, indeed.

4. Buddy Holly - Bo Diddley

The question, of course, is "what if?", and in Holly's case I can look equally at Pet Sounds or Blonde On Blonde or Wichita Lineman or even River Deep, Mountain High, and think "what if?" But long before all that 2Pac recycling, Norman Petty was busy polishing up some old demos with new Crickets backing, and still managed to make records more vital-sounding than much of what else is in this list. The central "Bo Diddley" guitar riff of course also materialised last week, in the midst of Bohannon's "Disco Stomp." Actually I can even look at "Rock Your Baby" with a "what if?" glance...

3. Shadows - Atlantis

Routine "Wonderful Land" wannabe.

2. Frank Ifield - Confessin'

Routine "I Remember You" wannabe but the third of four number ones.

1. Gerry & the Pacemakers - I Like It

One has to remember, of course, that if The Music Business had had its way, the Beatles would have never been allowed to record their own material (even during the beat boom, for instance, Manfred Mann were from "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" onwards not permitted to have their own compositions as A-sides; all those inconvenient composer royalties, you see...). Their projected first single was "How Do You Do It?" which they nicely scuppered by demoing it in a deliberately flat and colourless performance (see Anthology 1), following which George Martin and Parlophone relented - however, when the song was given to the Pacemakers, it was they, rather than the Beatles, who achieved the first Merseybeat number one. Much like Gary Barlow having two solo number ones before Robbie.

"I Like It" continued in the same irksome conveyor belt vein; the line "And I like the way you straighten my tie" and the way Marsden sings it with a loathsome music-hall wink, encapsulate why it was probably fortunate I was not present to witness these allegedly golden days. One more year to go until the real revolution...and even then...

There were better bands than the Beatles, a few anyway, from a "Merseybeat" perspective, although they didn't make hits.

IIRC it was Beatle policy to farm out "substandard" songs to other acts (e.g. Lennon on "I Wanna Be Your Man": "You didn't think we were going to give them a decent song, did you?").

TITLE: Sukiyaki
ARTIST: Kyu Sakamoto
Chart Position 25 Previous Week 35

TITLE: Fingertips Pt. 2
ARTIST: Stevie Wonder
Chart Position NEW RELEASE

TITLE: One Fine Day
ARTIST: The Chiffons
Chart Position NEW RELEASE

TITLE: Surf City
ARTIST: Jan & Dean
Chart Position NEW RELEASE

TITLE: Just One Look
ARTIST: Doris Troy
Chart Position NEW RELEASE

TITLE: Just Like Eddie
ARTIST: Heinz
Chart Position NEW RELEASE

TITLE: I Saw Her Standing There
ARTIST: The Beatles
From the number one album of the week, Please Please Me

TITLE: In Dreams
ARTIST: Roy Orbison
Chart Position 20 Previous Week 15

I think 'Sukiyaki' was played the first time I ever heard Pick Of The Pops, which was on a bus travelling into Croydon a few years ago - first time I'd ever heard 'Sukiyaki' too. I vaguely remember trying to listen to PITP the following week, and discovering it had vanished from the schedules to be replaced by Lorraine Chase or Lulu or something, and being a bit disappointed.

Highlight of this week's programme, for me anyhow, was after the Stevie Wonder song (which I don't remember that well, cos my housemate came in and started talking at me for a bit while it was on, so I could just about make out that it sounded like some kind of live recording, and I vaguely recall thinking "This is incredible" at one point) when Dale said something about how well it did in America, then added "We... didn't make it a hit over here..." in a tone of incredible trembling apology, but then followed it up with "... but we still love him!" It's been mentioned upthread, but it bears repeating that Winton's curatory tones on this programme really are quite a joy.

I really need to get me a Roy Orbison compilation one of these days, and that Jan & Dean song too: "two girls for ev-ry boy..." - really rather bloody breathtaking.

How could "Fingertips" fail in a chart dominated by harmonicas?

'Deck Of Cards', that I found altogether a bit disconcerting. "I was that soldier..."

xpost DAMMNIT!

20. Ten Years After - Love Like A Man

As I recall there was much publicity at the time about this being a 33 rpm single featuring the track in its entire ten minute plus length - some record companies were slowly trying to turn singles into mini-albums, with three-track maxis and what have you. Dale only played the radio edit. A fairly bog standard blues-rock jam (with an unfortunate opening line which sounds like: "You're so roly poly") but there is something admirable about a ten-minute blues-rock jam of any standard getting into the top ten. Their only hit single, mind (though they had eight hit albums).

19. Jimmy Ruffin - I'll Say Forever My Love

It broke me up when this came on, but not in a bad way; one cries the same way Sufjan cries in the van ("Chicago") out of joy and freedom. Knowing what this song, like so much of Detroit-era Motown, now means to me - to us - and thinking of Kevin Rowland's musing on the same song ("Reminisce Part Two" off Don't Stand Me Down), about walking down Edgware Road holding hands and all the rest of it, and to think that's about to come true again, for real; well it is just overwhelming.

The song only got to #77 in the US, as opposed to #6 here; Ruffin seems always to have been a more popular act in Britain.

18. Pickettywitch - (It's Like A) Sad Old Kinda Movie

Ah me, wasn't Polly Brown a great singer? The British Dionne Warwick. Whatever became of her? This verges on the brink of becoming an interesting Bacharach-David-type samba of slinkiness, but unfortunately the foursquare MoR production and arrangement kind of sinks it.

17. Christie - Yellow River

Dale didn't play it, which I didn't mind; was going to be a Tremeloes single until the last minute, when somebody at CBS decided that the writer's demo was better. Piece of trivia: when she first came over to Britain, Ruby Wax shared a flat with Jeff Christie.

16. Fleetwood Mac - The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Pronged Crown)

Dale didn't play this either. I wish he had done; it's one of the most terrifying encapsulations of a nervous breakdown on a "pop" single, Peter Green fighting against the demons which are swallowing him, losing and disappearing, screaming, into the blackest of voids.

But Green did come back, eventually, after two decades of virtual ruination, started playing, gigging and recording again; is this why he's unlikely to get the front page treatment when his time comes, as Syd did last week? I suppose his example was a large part of what kept people hanging on to Barrett's memory; if Peter Green, who went through pretty much the same hell, could come out the other end, then surely so could Syd. But Syd himself was probably too sure to allow that to happen. So again, in mourning Barrett's departure, we are really grieving for the departure of our own youth.

15. Glen Campbell - Honey Come Back

The biggest-selling of Campbell's Jimmy Webb interpretations in Britain, and on the surface the most conventional; but it is the belated third chapter of the Phoenix/Wichita trilogy - he left her, then he missed her, now he's trying to get her back, without much success. Campbell's delivery really makes the record; he speaks the verses, diplomatically, before suddenly veering into song in each last line, leading straight to the chorus - and he has rarely sounded closer to actual tears than he did here.

14. Status Quo - Down The Dustpipe

Dale also missed this one out; statistically, the most successful rock group in the history of the British singles chart (55 Top 40 hits and counting) limbering up on the touchline, polishing off their template which has proved to be one of the least destructible in all of pop, whatever you may make of it.

13. Elvis Presley - The Wonder Of You

On its way to becoming his first UK number one single in five years, and the last within his lifetime; knowing he has walked straight into a new and inescapable trap, his delivery of the Ray Peterson oldie seems to address his audience, though there is some bewilderment, and maybe even some mockery, dormant behind "I guess I'll never know the reason why/You love me as you do." Especially since they're watching and screaming at someone beginning to commit slow suicide on the stage of the International Hotel, Las Vegas. "Play it, James" - play anything...

12. Cat Stevens - Lady D'Arbanville

The first hit single for the "new" Cat Stevens, a modest mock-medieval roundelay of grief for a departed Other. Pretty slim pickings next to, say, Shirley and Dolly Collins' "Love, Death And The Lady," but remarkable nevertheless how the "newer" subsequent Cat Stevens seemed to take the sentiments of "I'm Gonna Get Me A Gun" as opposed to those of "Peace Train" to heart when it came to Salman Rushdie (and I note that, though he has recanted many aspects of his early extremism, he has never actually recanted that particular one).

11. Nicky Thomas - Love Of The Common People

Startlingly raw pop-reggae ruined somewhat by those bloody Willesden Sound strings. In any event it's still leagues ahead of the ghastly Paul Young cover with the worst backing vocals in the history of pop (the Fabulous Wealthy Tarts, were they not? Oh dearie me).

10. Shirley Bassey - Something

It peaked at #4, as did the Beatles original, but was on the chart for far longer, and it's quite spellbinding. Bassey of course can't help but convey even Harrison's quiet awe via a pantechnicon of megaphones - she'd be so lost without her bigness. And as a "gotta tell the world" expression of joy it's superb; Johnny Harris' arrangement stays just the right side of cheesy, floating into Bond-esque grandeur for the middle eights, shutting up in the verses so she can sing, and finally taking off in an uptempo "Girl In A Sportscar" mood as Shirley glides away to 1970 Monaco, to a world of Peter Wyngarde and Alexandra Bastedo and Joe Loss. The titular parent album is of course indispensable due to the inclusion of the greatest version of "Light My Fire" there has ever been or ever will be.

9. Cliff Richard - Goodbye Sam, Hello Samantha

His 50th single, but poor old Cliff was still at sea, wasn't he? This sounds like a England World Cup Squad song reject, all handclaps and martial chants. Presumably the lyric was intended to "reassure" certain of his fans, though note his little jibe "Easy Ridin' is fine."

8. Mr Bloe - Groovin' With Mr Bloe

The beginning of time...because of the chord changes, the Northern Soul feel and that harmonica which makes me think of Cadbury's Fingers and being a kid again.

7. Beach Boys - Cottonfields

Originally on 20/20, but Al Jardine was disappointed by Brian's underproduction so went into the studio with Carl to beef it up a bit. Very much in the "Sloop John B" mode; the Beach Boys singing Leadbelly looks unattainable in print, but through the ingenuity of the vocal arrangement it works, and the 3D nature of the relationship between pedal steel, guitars and percussion is nicely brought out. Note the "lickety split" motif which recurred in "I'm In Great Shape" from SMiLE.

6. Gerry Monroe - Sally

Is this the strangest single in the entire chart? To recap; Monroe was a Geordie (I think from South Shields) who won Opportunity Knocks. He was not young, looked the model for John Shuttleworth and sounded like a cross between Frank Ifield and Vic Reeves' club singer at 78 rpm, always breaking into unexpected, ear-splitting falsetto. These skills he applied to this update of the old Gracie Fields chestnut - and it remains truly mindboggling, open-mouthed, jaw-dropped listening. Had this been American Dr Demento would have seized on it immediately (it's a whisker away from Mrs Miller); but it's a sobering reminder that the world of Light Entertainment was just as important to the charts of 1970 (and for some years beyond) as any hairy union of students. Dale seems to think "he's probably still gigging somewhere," but seeing as he was pushing fifty at the time I have a feeling that he may have passed on some while ago. Still, if anyone knows different, etc...

5. Four Tops - It's All In The Game

Ah, lovely...the old standard produced and arranged by the great Frank Wilson, very much in the "Still Waters" mood. One of the few FT hits to feature lead vocals from the other three, and subsequently sampled for Betty Boo's "Let Me Take You There."

4. Kinks - Lola

I loved this song and the way Ray performed it on TOTP, cravat, winks and all, and demanded a copy; my dad responded in some horror - well, I didn't know what the lyrics were about, far too young to absorb such matters - but when I eventually twigged I was too far down that road anyway. Absolutely bloody great single, of course, and sexy in all the right ways (in the same way that the new Beyonce and Aguilera and Justin singles are sexy in all the wrong ways).

3. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Up Around The Bend

"Leave the sinking ship behind," sings Fogerty. The apocalypse has happened, and it's back to the land ("where the neon turns to wood"). Fantastic, of course...one forgets just how powerful CCR were in their own humble way.

2. Free - All Right Now

In contrast my dad loved this, especially for Paul Kossoff's extended guitar break (he did have strange tastes). Far too familiar for me to like now, I'm afraid, and too redolent of too many of the things I loathe about pop and rock music, but they were a fine band, and when this was new, in its pink Island sleeve, it felt good.

All kept off the top by:

1. Mungo Jerry - In The Summertime

- logically enough.

So many sex-change jokes around this song, back then...

20. Johnny & the Hurricanes - Down Yonder
As in "Way Down Yonder in da da da" presumably, and sounding like all other J&tH hits.

19. Everly Brothers - Cathy's Clown
Gilbert O'Sullivan still thinks this was a song about a chap named Cathis Clown. Such a common name.

18. Gene Vincent - Pistol Packin' Mama
Probably his biggest-selling British single. Also one of his worst.

17. Jimmy Jones - Handy Man
Slightly better than the James Taylor cover.

16. Ken Dodd - Love Is Like A Violin
Balladic reading of what became his theme tune, speeded up to 200 bpm like Alec Empire or something.

15. Anthony Newley - If She Should Come To You
"...then follow." Slushy ballad which sounds nothing like "Wild Is The Wind."

14. Garry Mills - Look For A Star
I'd have to be reminded of this, but I think it was another slushy ballad.

13. Brenda Lee - I'm Sorry
I prefer her when she's screaming about her baby whispering in her ear.

12. Everly Brothers - When Will I Be Loved?
The Everlys were clearly the standouts in this chart from the point of view of creativity and thrust. Both this and 19 (above) demonstrate a robust originality absent from nearly everything else in the list. And the Linda Ronstadt version wasn't half bad either.

11. Brian Hyland - Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini
And the Bombalurina version wasn't half bad either.

10. Michael Cox - Angela Jones
Ah, the Meek magic again, even on this minor teen ballad with its Nell in Camberwell unfinished couplets. Curiously went on to become a superstar in Sweden.

9. Lonnie Donegan - I Wanna Go Home
Same song as "Sloop John B" but arrangement not as good.

8. Eddie Cochran - Three Steps To Heaven
The second posthumous British number one single.

7. Connie Francis - Mama/Robot Man
Her two sides, so to speak; the former an ancient Italian weepie, the original of which my mum has on 78 and plays nearly all the time, and the latter the clear antecedent of Dee D Jackson's "Automatic Lover." Why doesn't Dale do 1978? Much more interesting.

6. Tommy Steele - What A Mouth
Good morning, Chas and, indeed, Dave.

5. Adam Faith - When Johnny Comes Marching Home/Made You
The former was used as the theme to the film Never Let Go starring Peter Sellers as a vicious gangster and Faith as his unfortunate sidekick. Never was Sellers more terrifying either - as Roger Lewis notes in his biography, he virtually invents Frank Booth.

The latter I don't recall at all but I could make a good guess.

4. Johnny Kidd & the Pirates - Shakin' All Over
Fantastic, technicolor where all else is rotogravure, beginning of time, etc.

3. Tommy Bruce & the Bruisers - Ain't Misbehavin'
I see poor old Tommy Bruce died last week (only 68). Fats Waller sung in the style of the Big Bopper, for those who like that kind of stuff.

2. Cliff Richard & the Shadows - Please Don't Tease
I wouldn't dare.

1. Jimmy Jones - Good Timin'
Who was this Jimmy Jones? Two massive hits at the same time, nothing before or since. Did Jimmy Savile dream him?

I do hope we get a better year next week...

"Timex! Tick-a tick-a tick-a tick-a Timex!"

"Alberto V05 makes your hair look alive/Makes it shiny-shiny-shiny like an apple."

???????????????????

note how Poole has to lower the song's key by a full octave

Dropping the song's pitch by an octave would not involve a key change, because you'd be going from, say, C to C.

But what I really wanted to ask was, have you really bought every single Top 40 single since 1974?

Mostly they're stored at home in Glasgow but I do have the best of them down here on CD or C90.

(Liam Gallagher does the same with his cover of "Cum On Feel The Noize")

This week, the Top 20 as of week ending 2 August 1967 – right in the middle of the alleged Summer of Love, so it’s an appropriate choice, and also a very good chart indeed, even though it continues to demonstrate the divide between the two markets fighting for supremacy; the kids against their parents, the sunny future against the whitening past, a chart of two halves.

20. Nancy Sinatra – Jackson (with Lee Hazlewood)/You Only Live Twice
A double A-side, and Dale played “Jackson.” Its cheerily cynical take on the Carter/Cash original is exactly the type of record which fits a breezier but still bright Sunday afternoon. Note how the record pivots on Hazlewood’s seemingly throwaway aside “I doubt it” halfway through. The other side was Hazlewood’s own production of the Bond theme, with its fuzz guitar lead and multiple harmonising Nancys; far more dramatic than the more tranquil John Barry-produced original, but both are of equal and balancing brilliance.

19. Desmond Dekker & the Aces – 007 (Shanty Town)
Speaking of Bond…Dale didn’t play this, though should have done given Dekker’s recent passing. The beginning of (dub) time.

18. Gladys Knight & the Pips – Take Me In Your Arms And Love Me
Few soul singers manage to balance strength and vulnerability as perfectly, but also as humanely, as Gladys Knight. The harpsichord motif indicates Motown’s continuing reluctant rapproachment with psychedelia at the time, but the song and performance are commandingly superb; Gladys ready to surrender and also to give (“Here I am!”) but quivering with impatient desire. When she climaxes with the line “Any second now, I’ll explode” you can truly believe it. Magnificent – this was Gladys and the Pips’ first British hit.

17. Mamas & the Papas – Creeque Alley
Regular readers will know that I tend to frown on self-referential pop records – and there are more of those higher up this list – but again, there’s such goodwill and enthusiasm in this sung recap of the group’s story to date, together with the arrangement quirks of saloon tack piano and wandering solo alto flute, that I forgive them. Despite all the in-band bitching and backsliding we now know occurred, none of it is evident on this triumphantly good-humoured record. I’ve really come to appreciate the value of the Mamas and Papas’ music – and Cass’ solo work – a lot more recently; one of the positive factors of the fuller integration of downloads into the singles chart is that we could see strange but beautiful things like “Make Your Own Kind Of Music” come back into the Top 40 entirely of its own accord, or at least on the back of being featured in Lost.

16. Young Rascals – Groovin’
Their only UK hit single as performers (though “How Can I Be Sure?” hit number one in David Cassidy’s version five years later) and they deserved a lot more. According to Dale, it was only released as a single on the insistence of Murray the K, who supposedly hung out with the band on their recording sessions of the period. Superb summer pop, with its idyllic and lazy post-“Hey Baby” harmonica and strong soulful harmony vocals solidifying the record’s noble woozy drift.

15. Aretha Franklin – Respect
Aretha, as you all know, has never been one of my favourite soul singers, but in not only this context, but the context in which Lily Allen is hailed as an avatar of future femaleness, one has to respect “Respect.” She takes the amiable braggadocio grunts of the Otis Blue original and violently turns it into a demand, for her gender and also for her race, wanting the world now. And, thanks to Steve Cropper’s guitar diving bends as well as to the combined arranging and producing genius of Dowd, Wexler and Mardin, the record is electrifying, like electricity had just been forced into being invented.

14. Anita Harris – Just Loving You
But in the Britain of 1967, women were still largely being abandoned at home during the long, long “working” day, the valium and cognac to hand and the deep, teak Bush radiogram with its stock of deliberate, dramatic ballads which both reassured and rubbed it in. “Just Loving You,” written by Tom Springfield, never climbed higher than #6 (not #4, as Dale claimed) but was on the chart for 30 straight weeks and became one of that year’s biggest singles. Anita, bless her, does her best to imbue the workaday lullaby with emotion, but the song is built on a parlous lie. Despite her other career, as an actress and dancer, finally taking precedence, she did produce some interesting singles – “London Life,” for instance, or the genuinely bizarre cod-psychedelia of “The Playground.” But “Just Loving You” and the “Anniversary Waltz” were the ones which sold, and the world they depict was the one which, in the end, thrived, if “thrive” can be deemed the correct adjective.

13. Lulu – Let’s Pretend
Not played by Dale, and on refreshing my memory via my copy of the Most Of Lulu album, not worth playing.

12. Engelbert Humperdinck – There Goes My Everything
Watching John Turturro’s recent film Romance And Cigarettes recently, I was struck by the good and creative use it made of Engelbert’s “A Man Without Love” in its various contexts. That latter might be Humperdinck’s best record, since in his performance of the song he succumbs to an element of self-parody. But in 1967 he remained what Billy MacKenzie described as “Thunderbirds in pop,” a staunch, steely Virgil Tracy lookalike whose world was gradually slipping from his less-than-firm grasp. His three ’67 singles were the three biggest-selling singles of that year, and “Everything” continues the sorry story which they narrate, all about wilful loss and needless, agonising pain – even if only on the part of the listener.

11. Johnny Mann Singers – Up, Up And Away
The British music industry trick of quickfire covers of American hits was still in force in 1967, as evinced by this soundalike (but nowhere near spirit-alike) Fifth Dimension cover of Jimmy Webb’s first major hit song, all about the pleasures of a beautiful balloon ride, yeah and, indeed, right. Dale didn’t play this either.

10. Procol Harum – A Whiter Shade Of Pale
Some commentators remain sceptical about the record, but I can sometimes find it in me to believe it – almost. It’s fair to mark “Whiter Shade” as one bookend of an era of exploratory pop slowly mutating into rock, an era of ever-expanding single lengths and concepts, with the other bookend being “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The success of both records depends on the capacity of the public to deploy the fascination-over-meaning meme (“Nothing really matters,” as Freddie Baudrillard-Mercury put it); if something sounded profound, then it was, by definition, profound.

By Gary Brooker’s own admission the song is a cross between “Air On A G String” and “When A Man Loves A Woman” with lyrics suggesting some admiration of the third and fourth sides of Blonde On Blonde, though with a distinctly English slant – little wonder that Procol became one of the very few rock groups to obtain Spike Milligan’s approval. But the performance, as with “Bo Rap,” is crucial; both Brooker and Mercury possess the charisma to take the listener with them. And Brooker’s performance is so indelibly soulful that the question lies in addressing the emotions which he is really expressing. Think of Procol then, and Keane now, and see the gulf which lies between that achievement and an overly polite facsimile.

9. Pink Floyd – See Emily Play
Ah me, poor Syd; but also, poor Floyd. It’s not at all unfair to assert that the haphazard diagonals, swirling atonalities and Barrett’s total grasp of the underlying pop aesthetic represent something from which the Floyd have been determinedly walking away in their subsequent four decades. What they were determinedly walking towards, of course, isn’t necessarily a negation of what they did with Syd – ask yourself whether Dark Side Of The Moon’s reputation as the kneejerk Greatest Album Of All Time frames the kneejerk as a red herring, and then listen to it every so often and realise, with a slow, sweating build-up, that it actually might just be the Greatest Album Of All Time – but nonetheless, apart from the jerky 7/4 of “Money” and the mid-tempo sit-in of “Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)” (and the unexpected decade-capping triumph of the latter as a single indicates that maybe pop was waiting a decade to come back to Pink Floyd, rather than vice versa) virtually nothing the Floyd have done since 1968 can be described as uptempo; indeed, the arching octave bass motif which Waters introduces in the fadeout to “Emily” seems to set the group up for their entire post-Barrett future.

As it is, “Emily” is a brilliant single which should have been a number one, and Joe Meek should have lived to produce it, since it brings to mind the Tornados hijacked by AMM – all those splutters, clouds and shrieks which continually intrude into the song’s post-Mod schema – and its divebombing fuzz bass-as-‘cello motif introducing each verse remains dazzlingly dizzy. Dale even indulged in a blurry metaphor involving three Haliborange tablets and a can of Lilt. Listen to this and you may understand my reluctance to go overboard in applause for the Secret Machines and their approximation of Kitchens Of Distinction covering The Joshua Tree.

8. Stevie Wonder – I Was Made To Love Her
You know, this chart is not uniformly great, but when it’s great, it’s among the greatest. “I Was Made To Love Her” is a record which has eased its way back into my recent life for various well-known reasons; you see, when I speak about nowness, no record to me at the moment says NOW as boldly and proudly as this one does. 17-year-old Stevie’s performance is astonishingly assured and mind-meltingly emotional. Listen to how his lips hungrily settle on the “DORE” section of the line “worship and aDORE her,” his untranslatable but unmistakably joyous yell in the middle section and his astonished proclamation of “My baby LOVES me! My baby NEEDS me!” (as in, he can hardly believe it), and finally, how, with his “Stand By Me” quotations, his love could stop the world from tumbling and crumbling. The sitar-esque guitar riff betrays yet another eye on psychedelia, but it works. And compared to the utterly docile, asexual harmonica on “Just Loving You,” Stevie’s harp roars his ecstasy effortlessly and wordlessly. By the time he’s exclaiming words about “wedding bells” you’re there in that aisle, with your beloved; it’s that easy, that direct, that brilliant.

7. Turtles – She’d Rather Be With Me
Differences between American and British pop productions, part 374: consider how this song could easily have fitted into the repertoire of the Dave Clark Five or the Tremeloes or the Foundations. Yet the future Flo and Eddie – and this is what I mean by punctum in pop, as opposed to mere studium – go that crucial extra mile in production and arrangement. The brass is blown as an axiomatic centre to the song, not tucked away in a discreet corner, and no British producer of that period could have come up with the genius timbale break before the final, key-changing, skyscraping verse and fadeout. It’s the missing link between John Philip Sousa and the Teardrop Explodes. “She don’t fly, although she can.” Is that the Turtles’ definition of a lady?

6. Tom Jones – I’ll Never Fall In Love Again
Oh dear. Tom so wants to be Solomon Burke, but usually ends up being just a berk. The uncompromisingly hammy “crying” towards the end of this song even threatens to make Vikki Carr (see below) look restrained in comparison. Co-written by, of all unlikely people, Lonnie Donegan (it is definitely not the Bacharach/David number). Perhaps if we just squint our eyes to the right angle and pretend that James Carr’s “Dark End Of The Street” got to number two and spent 25 weeks on the chart rather than this…or Howard Tate’s “I Learned It All The Hard Way”…or…anything…

5. Monkees – Alternate Title (a.k.a. Randy Scouse Git)
Because Mickey Dolenz was watching Till Death Us To Part; because British radio would never play it and Americans wouldn’t understand the reference in the first place. But the Monkees’ second-biggest British single was also one of the year’s furthest-out hits – imagine something this avant garde not only coming from a boy band in 2006, but also reaching number two – and the first which they wrote, played and produced entirely on their own. Really it’s another day-in-the-life diary as song, as Dolenz muses about meeting the Beatles (“the four kings of EMI”) or his future wife (“the being known as Wonder Girl”), alternating (you see?) with screaming rants (“Why don’t you cut your hair?” “Why don’t I kill to be free?”). The music similarly switches between vaudeville trifle and ominous, organ/timpani-heavy pop-psych bitonal meltdown before finally dwindling to a sudden and inglorious (but glorious) halt. And McFly think doing Queen covers is adventurous.

4. Vikki Carr – It Must Be Him
Real name Florencia Bisenta de Castillas Martinez Cardona, no less, and hailing from El Paso, Carr was essentially a one trick pony whose speciality was melodramatic ballads about the loss of love during which she always contrived to break down in tears, when she wasn’t attempting to impersonate Judy Garland. The hits quickly dried up so I’ve no idea whether those tears ever became real, but no doubt she’s still watering to order on some cabaret circuit somewhere.

3. Dave Davies – Death Of A Clown
Ostensibly a solo single, but really a Kinks record in disguise (since Ray Davies had temporarily become tired of doing lead vocals, though he wrote the song and his snide harmony vocal is clearly evident) – and it’s also one of the scariest singles in this list; the apocalypse as end-of-the-pier pub singalong, concealing one of Ray Davies’ bitterest depictions of everything in the world he knew and loved rotting to a halt. The humour derives directly from the gallows; see the splintering piano innards which answer the line “The fortune teller lies dead on the floor,” as though they’ve just been inserted through the hapless fortune teller’s head. There was supposed to be an accompanying Dave Davies album which went even further into leftfield, but that has yet to appear.

2. Scott McKenzie – San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)
Such hope – and does such hope necessarily entail being foolish? McKenzie was an old cohort of John Phillips, who wrote the song for him to sing – and the emotions behind the song were by all accounts heartfelt – and he seized his gentle moment. As I suspect is the case with a lot of these records, you may have had to have been aged between 14 and 30 at the time to appreciate their contemporary resonance, to grasp what they actually meant to the people who listened to them and loved them. Now, listening to “San Francisco,” I feel melancholic, and not just because of those tubular bells and all the spaces in the production (even with that slightly clumsy pseudo-sitar middle eight), but because…well, as with “Telstar,” this record seems not just to represent, but to promise, a future which we all knew deep down would never come to pass. The world continues to turn and burn, and songs like “San Francisco” become as quaint a period piece as the songs the workers sang on the Jarrow march; a historical chimera whose chimes are nevertheless still resonant today.

1. Beatles – All You Need Is Love
On the 1967-70 “blue” compilation “A Day In The Life” is scheduled as the penultimate track on side one. It would seem, then as now, a record unanswerable – Sgt Pepper was easing into its six-month run at the top of the album chart, but “A Day In The Life” seemed to stare the rest of that record in the face, or stare it down. It is of course the apex of self-referential songs in pop, but transcends its fate because it suggests that these routine, random, trivial events are all taking place on the last day of everybody’s life. That final piano chord ebbs into an inhuman hum (of office air conditioners), suggesting incipient high plutonium levels, 250,000 years and counting.

After a suitably meaningful pause, we get Le Marseillaise, and “All You Need Is Love,” perhaps the nadir of self-referential songs in pop. The song was written very quickly for a proto-Live Aid worldwide link-up BBC programme, and it shows – facile homilies sung by a composer who patently isn’t believing any of them. The production is purposely shambolic, with the Great and the Good’s backing vocals not very forward in the mix. The accordion-as-rhythm device was probably derived from “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” No doubt the aura of the time is necessary to appreciate or even like “All You Need Is Love,” but eventually it all falls apart in the first explicit inference of pop eating itself – Greensleeves, In The Mood, and finally, and destructively, smug quotations of Yesterday and She Loves You. Thus is the paradise proposed by “San Francisco” disastrously undermined by “All You Need Is Love” – and no one understood that better than Patrick McGoohan, who used the song to soundtrack the climactic massacre in the final episode of The Prisoner.

there is some amazingly good writing on this thread, especially the 1967 chart. I wonder what MC will make of the chart from a year earlier?

20. Frank Sinatra – Strangers In The Night
On the way down, and not played by Dale; as near to a cryogenically frozen number one you could find, as Frank’s rapidly dating concept of sophistication gets a superficial Germanic gloss of “contemporary” redolent of The Yellow Rolls Royce, BEA, Cyril Lord carpets, Richard Wattis and other signifiers which have failed to endure.

19. Hollies – Bus Stop
Dale didn’t play this either; one of Graham Gouldman’s best metapop vignettes with its klezmer fadeout, and it does work as the first part of a Gouldman triptych with “Stop Stop Stop” (temptation) and “No Milk Today” (penance).

18. Bob Dylan – I Want You
Hello, Steve Harley.

17. The Alan Price Set – Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo
I’ve got quite a lot to say about Alan Price on one blog or another, whenever I get around to it; a strange but not displeasing update of an ancient slice of Germanic gloss with punctulating horns (among them, John Walters on trumpet) solidly on the beat, recalling both Cliff Bennett’s “One Way Love” and the theme from Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show (and if someone can tell me where I can find the latter on CD, I’ll be their friend forever…).

16. Beach Boys – God Only Knows
By some distance the most difficult single in this list to write about, since it has long since been written about to death. So there is little left to do other than marvel at the song’s haikuesque concision, its undeniably genuine emotion which skilfully slaloms around traps of sentimentality (“I may not always love you,” “Though life would still go on, believe me”) but steers straight into cries of candour (“So what good would living do me?”), the arrangement which suggests summer on the verge of turning into a ghost (the echoed doubled-up French horn and flute break, the accordion as rhythm guitar), and Carl Wilson’s beyond-miraculous lead vocal (“Trader” is the only serious rival in the Beach Boys catalogue for the best Carl vocal performance). The suspension of time, part 1.

15. Cliff Richard – Visions
The closing number from his BBC TV series of the time, i.e. his “May Each Day,” and a somewhat bizarre choice since it’s a rather moping ballad about lost love, sung exactly as it would have been in 1951

14. Gene Pitney – Nobody Needs Your Love
His biggest solo UK hit, along with “I’m Gonna Be Strong” (both peaked at #2), and a typically strong and vulnerable reading of another early Randy Newman song, though it lacks the still-startling octave-leap punctum at the end of “I’m Gonna Be Strong” (actually, it lacks an end).

13. Walker Brothers – (Baby) You Don’t Have To Tell Me
A reminder of how few uptempo songs there are in the Scott catalogue (some of the Brel songs, three-quarters of his Nite Flights songs, “Track Three”), but his startled rabbit enunciations of “Go ahead and tell me that’s life” and “You are giving me a taste of life, but gi-HIRL!” indicate that Scott could never afford to be happy. Otherwise, a fairly stolid retread of the “Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” format. A pity Fontana didn’t take a chance and put out “In My Room” or “Orpheus” as a single.

12. Lovin’ Spoonful – Summer In The City
Pneumatic drills and sirens drip like bloody tarmac over song of meltdown; frantic out of sweating desperation, its descending chords anticipating psychedelia – and even in this relatively quiet, 28-degree Sunday it continues to sound utterly contemporary.

11. Ike & Tina Turner – River Deep, Mountain High
The end of time, part 2. Spector tears his playhouse down for a final Valhalla of self-immolating pop glory, is smart enough to lock Ike out of the studio, uses two drummers and five bassists, and works the Greenwich/Barry boy/girl lyric, via toys to sex, to its unspoken extreme, making sure that Tina’s at her most triumphant and – literally – hysterical; she is coming practically second of the record…and then that final pause with the congas and finger snaps before the final breakthrough, the apocalypse of apocalypses, as the rhythm tsunami submerges everyone, but no, she’s not beaten, Prometheus unchained, drenched in the ocean to douse the flames and ignite new and deeper ones, and WATCH as those strings and THOSE TRUMPETS go AS HIGH AS ANY GOD COULD and then she COMES THAT SCREAM THAT THOUSAND HUMAN SCREAM AND THE WORLD FUCKING EXPLODES and I think of Elizabeth Smart – how can I not? - and hope I’m better than George Barker and I SAT DOWN UNDER HIS SHADOW WITH GREAT DELIGHT AND HIS FRUIT WAS SWEET TO MY TASTE

and that last THUMP of the demolition ball, smashing down the Wall Of Fucking Sound and you’d never know it had been there, except on practically every other record in this list

(think of “God Only Knows” as the Resurrection three days later)

(oh yes)

10. Dusty Springfield – Goin’ Back
“And I can play hide and seek with my fears/And live my days instead of counting my years.”

It’s her greatest vocal performance and also one of her quietest; surrendering to vulnerable when it needs to, but also politely and irreversibly defiant; and maybe you need to live as long as we have to understand exactly what Goffin and King were getting at; forget it, forget the bloody lot, get back to life, get back to the people and the things you love, in that order, sod “now”; in middle age, youth is only sustainable when you can learn enough from it to keep you alive a bit longer.

The Raymonde/Franz arrangement/production is one of their finest; tender piano, that astonishing Fairchild compressor-enabled surge of brass and choir in the centre, and then back to the quietude its singer deserves, though in real life never really found. But this singer was the greatest of them all; inviting but untouchable, in every sense, conceivable and inconceivable.

I listen to this song…and then Queen’s “These Are The Days Of Our Lives” (the sequel Mary Hopkin deserved)…and I see forty, fifty, sixty years of you and me…with the happiness we both so richly deserve.

9. Kinks – Sunny Afternoon
Grumpy why-pay-taxes whine from Our Ray, with his bankrupt’s ice-cool beer, and the hay fever he had at the recording session which necessitated that the song be recorded in one take.

8. Petula Clark – I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love
Again, with Pet and Tony and Jackie at their peak, they make you feel as if you’re standing atop Everest. This ranks with “Gotta Tell The World” as Petula’s most unambiguously joyous proclamation of unconditional love. The orchestra rises like skyscrapers behind and around and above her. Triumphant in the best way.

7. Dave Berry – Mama
“She’s the one who knew just when to come” – clever lyric, but a crappy song; sentimental “Grandad”-anticipating slop. Track down “Don’t Give Me No Lip Child” though, if you can (it mysteriously does not appear on any Berry CD compilations).

6. Elvis Presley – Love Letters
Recorded in Nashville, and he sings the song deep and slightly distant, like a hymn he’s embarrassed people might hear him humming. His only British top ten single between “Crying In The Chapel” and “In The Ghetto.”

5. Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames – Get Away
Ah, so there was some hype involved in this getting to number one; I knew Fame wrote it for a National petrol commercial, but I didn’t know about the campaign to give away a free copy of the single with every four gallons of petrol purchased! Tut tut! Puts Lily Allen into perspective, doesn’t it? I think the only other single to “sell” on this basis was Jonathan King’s Smurfs parody (“Lick A Smurp For Christmas (All Fall Down)” by “Father Abraphart and the Smurps”), though the latter peaked considerably lower than number one.

4. Chris Montez – The More I See You
Oh my GOD – I’ve been playing this song a lot lately (thanks to the very fine compilation of his A&M ‘60s work reissued courtesy of those nice Saint Etienne chaps – see also Suite London by the Peddlers, in fact GO OUT AND BUY IT NOW; free form orchestral trip-hop and drum ‘n’ bass – in 1972!) and it makes me feel lovely and summery and sensual; such a happy reading of the old standard, those handclaps, those vibes, those heavenly key changes, the missing link between Trini Lopez and Sergio Mendes. In this summer, the first happy summer I’ve had in six years, this means so much to me; makes me glad I decided to stick around on this planet.

3. Los Bravos – Black Is Black
Always somewhat too shrill for my tastes, but an admirably punchy Spanish (or Mexican?) attempt at Brit Beat. My opinion is also clouded by the funny feelings that the La Belle Epoque ’77 disco cover engendered in my 13-year-old sensual self.

2. Chris Farlowe & the Thunderbirds – Out Of Time
It’s a bloody great record as a record, really, even though its sexual politics are typically primeval by Jagger/Richards standards; still sounds dynamic now, and terrific performances by all involved, including Joe Morello, whom I now belatedly thank for his kind comment on the comment I made in the appropriate Popular entry.

1. Troggs – With A Girl Like You
A comparatively dull chart-topper after all that excitement; the BBC were loath to give any airplay to “Wild Thing” or “I Can’t Control Myself,” so this can be interpreted as the group “behaving themselves.” “Can I dance with you” indeed!

This week, a chart which belongs to a palpable part of my youth – the Top 20 week ending 13 August 1977, just prior to the commencement of my third year at grammar school and the rueful realisation that I was going to have to start taking this academic business seriously.

20. John Miles – Slow Down
I don’t think the “Music” man’s thrust at disco has ever been revived on radio, and today Dale proved no exception to that rule.

19. Deniece Williams – That’s What Friends Are For
“Free” had been number one a few months previously, and is pretty unbeatable in its chilled-cabinet pop-soul field, even if one got the impression that she was acting as a ghost for Minnie Riperton. “That’s What Friends Are For” is blander and blunter, but the glowing hearth of a voice (“Are you hungry? Do you think that you could use some wine?”) renders the record more than serviceable. I just wish that Minnie’s “Inside My Love” had been the hit instead. Rare back-announcing error from Dale too; he said that the song returned to the charts courtesy of Dionne Warwick and Friends in 1985, but that “That’s What Friends Are For” was of course a different song entirely (and not one of Bacharach’s best either).

18. Bob Marley & the Wailers – Exodus
Well, I was listening to plenty of reggae in ’77, but it was all “Two Sevens Clash” and “Born With A Purpose” – the “hard” stuff. Mind you, even if I had settled for Marley, I would have been unique in my school (though I did see one prefect a couple of years later carrying Babylon By Bus under her arm). As with all of Marley’s work not produced by Lee Perry, I can appreciate “Exodus” – by far the hardest-edged of his UK hits - but it still strikes me as the most rockist of reggae, and I keep thinking of Clapton and smelly leather pads.

17. Candi Staton – Nights On Broadway
Her 1970 reading of “In The Ghetto” might surpass Elvis’, but this Bee Gees interpretation is merely workaday, lacking the ravaging rancour of her best work.

16. Detroit Emeralds – Feel The Need In Me
A re-recording of the 1973 original, not that you’d notice. Not played.

15. Hot Chocolate – So You Win Again
Their only UK number one, but again, Dale passed on it.

14. Alessi – Oh Lori
And indeed on this; rather strange considering its recent Guilty Pleasures-assisted “rehabilitation,” not that it needed rehabilitation – lovely androgynous vocals and a soundtrack as airy as that summer bicycle they’re merrily riding.

13. Stranglers – Something Better Change
Actually a double A-side with “Straighten Out,” but Dale did play this, and it’s great; the two main memories I have of the record are:
(a) this was the record playing on the Radio Luxembourg chart rundown when my dad came in and announced the death of Elvis;
(b) the “dying fly” routine I did to Hugh Cornwell’s freakout guitar solo at that autumn’s school disco, of which veterans still speak fondly to this day.

12. Sex Pistols – Pretty Vacant
Not played; presumably, even on the “new,” “cool” Radio 2 this was considered too much of a liberty to play on a placid Sunday afternoon. Much like the “old,” “uncool” Radio 2 did. “You’re getting diluted shit!” as Mark Perry screams on “Alternatives,” and it’s hard to argue even now. Mustn’t upset the old folk, most of whom fucked off to Saga Radio several years ago.

11. Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers – Roadrunner (Once)/Roadrunner (Twice)
Oh, silly Dale, you played the wrong side; the Cale-produced/”Sister Ray”-derived “Once” is fine in itself, but the “Twice” remake was the classic which soundtracked MY summer – full of exquisite understanding of tension and release under its screen of naivete; its apparent thrown-togetherness reminded me that anything was achievable in visionary pop music. “With the pine trees in the dark – it’s so cold here in the dark,” with that buzzing bass and not much else beneath. It was exotic yet homely; the fact that drummer D Sharpe joined the Carla Bley Band the following year seemed to confirm that if the lines opened by Escalator had been properly followed and worked through, this is the kind of pop Bley might have produced. To see this at number eleven in the national charts was, I felt, a landmark of some kind; the same “we’re winning” mode which came into operation again in ’79 and ’82.

10. Smokie – It’s Your Life
Chinn and Chapman were really stuck in that period of limbo between glam and Racey (or Blondie in the latter’s case), and with Smokie they attempted to be “proper” and “worthy” songwriters. This top five hit saw them attempt reggae. Dodgy remakes of “Living Next Door To Alice” aside, when was the last time you heard Smokie being played on the radio? Exactly.

9. Commodores – Easy
That. Fucking. Building. Society. Advert.

8. Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Fanfare For The Common Man
Their only UK single as a group, in the year of punk, which in itself is pretty punk; better known in my quarters as the theme from Reporting Scotland, this uneasy prog-schaffel jazzing-up of Copland stands as the missing link between Love Sculpture and Miami Vice-era Jan Hammer.

7. The RAH Band – The Crunch
Whereas this far easier and frankly fantastic proto-schaffel instrumental stomp is the missing link between Hot Butter and B.E.F., and I’ve just dug out my original 1977 cassette of K-Tel’s Disco Fever (side one, track four) to do another stupid dance to it around my front room. Great sax from Peter King.

6. Rita Coolidge – We’re All Alone
It was the year of punk but I loved Boz Scaggs’ Silk Degrees album and still do, which in itself is fairly punk. Lovely Rita does a fairly decent job of interpreting its best ballad, although her voice is slightly too throaty in the way that, for instance, Kiki Dee on “Amoreuse” isn’t.

5. Boney M – Ma Baker
I suppose it’s an improvement on “The Ballad Of Bonnie And Clyde.” There was and is something faintly if fascinatingly alien about German-based multinational assembly line groups singing about ‘30s American gangsters (or Belfast, or Rasputin) and not getting it quite right. But that still leaves a sizeable gulf between Boney M and the Fritz Lang and Kraftwerk way of not getting it quite right. I remain deeply sceptical about their worth.

4. Floaters – Float On
Sounds like a discarded dating agency tape played over a dissolving Rotary Connection backing track. However, it was a number one (“Sharing your love with LA-RRY!”) and might still be the missing link between the Delfonics and the Village People.

3. Showaddywaddy – You Got What It Takes
Darts were already closing in on their market, with considerably more intelligence, discretion, character and punch. This is “rock and roll” as Ted Rogers or Bernie Winters might have known it (I’m sure one or the other of them was a judge on New Faces the week Showaddywaddy won) – the Marv Johnson oldie, made to sound like the Grumbleweeds.

2. Brotherhood of Man – Angelo
I even recall Steve Wright playing this one afternoon in the ‘80s and exclaiming: “THIS is why punk had to happen!” I mean, Steve Wright! They were bad enough when saving their kisses for you (“even though you’re only three” – another one you’d never get away with now) but when they tried to be Abba…just give me strength. Actually, virtually this entire fucking top ten explains why punk needed to happen.

1. Donna Summer – I Feel Love
I said “virtually.” And I said “punk.”
And then there was the future. A future I’d latched on to because I liked Mike Oldfield and Can, so my dad thought I’d like Kraftwerk, and eventually that led to Trans-Europe Express, in combination with the Bowie and Iggy of ’77, and I could both look and listen and know where the real future was heading.
So Chicory Tip, and so then there was Moroder, and eventually there was Silver Convention (brokered by Pete Waterman), and eventually Donna Summer went solo…

…and eventually she FEELS love but is uniquely and utterly trapped within Moroder’s silver phial of electropop for five minutes and fifty-five seconds – the exact same length as “Bohemian Rhapsody,” so that strand of the story hadn’t quite been finished with yet; the loose strand breaking free to begin a tapestry all of its own – her voice is faded in and out as the mood takes Moroder, and for the central part of the single disappears altogether…yet she is omnipresent, pulsing, maybe already looking in from outside…

…and it is because I was reading Gollancz’s gargantuan Science Fiction Argosy anthology which I’d borrowed from Uddingston Library on a long-term basis, and within it Bester’s Demolished Man and Sturgeon’s More Than Human, and so this representation of The Future tickled me and teased me, and I sat in my bedroom listening to Paul Burnett or whoever it was playing it for the first time and I knew I had heard nothing like it before…

…so “I Feel Love” is the supreme missing link, between “Telstar” and “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head,” between “Radio-Activity” and “Blue Monday,” between “Be My Baby” and “Some Girls”; it is yet another of those crossroads in pop music where everything that has preceded it meets up with everything that is to succeed it, blinks at each other for a second, and then criss-cross and merge to form something new. It is a locktight container of pop, and therefore, in the most literal of senses, deathless and perfect.

Showaddwaddy, Arse Miles and BoM apart, I love, or at least like, everything in this chart. The run 11 to 19 is wonderful, and a micro-example of why the pop charts in the late 70s are the best.thing.ever!

I still absolutely love Fanfare To The Common Man!

midday, to the sum of the people queueing for hotdogs from 2 vans.

at least the version of "Ma Baker" Dale played wasn't backed by the Top of the Pops Orchestra, and at least it wasn't sung live with the bloke blatantly not trying (going some way to convince me that actually they may well have been the Milli Vanilli that was never found out) and at least it didn't feature DLT doing the spoken bit. unlike the performance on the Christmas 1977 TOTP, easily one of the worst in the programme's history.

20. Paul Da Vinci - Your Baby Ain't Your Baby Anymore
This really is a bizarre and slightly unhinged record. Da Vinci was the uncredited lead vocalist on "Sugar Baby Love" but didn't appear on TOTP and wasn't keen to continue as a Rubette. Nevertheless I recall some sticky legal issues, and he accordingly went off to Penny Farthing Records (remember them?) and attempted a solo career.

The song's opening is of a species of pop which would be untenable today; imagine Ravel's Bolero played by the Billy Cotton Band or the Opportunity Knocks orchestra, slowly speeding up before Da Vinci's falsetto pierces the fabric to split the listener's ears.

(Incidentally, did anyone else watch BBC2's Story Of Light Entertainment on Saturday evening, on the theme of "pop music and easy listening"? Fascinating, if only to grasp the rather awful parallels between the fifties - the ghastly, keep-all-the-family-happy faux-bonhomie of the really rather scary figure of Billy Cotton, and the earnest but over-hopefully eclectic attempt to be hip with 6.5 Specials - and their contemporary equivalents in The X-Factor (though Ant and Dec fit the Cotton template far more snugly, and smugly) and Later With Jools Holland. The growing schism between Credible Rock(ism) and Easy Listening on TV was well-handled - indeed, the whole MoR strand of 1967-77 British music deserves a series of its own - but Bolan was, as always, the standout; crooning "Life's A Gas" with Cilla or doing "I Love To Boogie" on Marc with a Kwik Save Pan's People behind him, he effortlessly transcended all the trappings - and God, was he sexy and svelte...)

But back to Paul Da Vinci; the song is a clone of "Sugar Baby Love" but tailored more for the West End stage - significantly it was co-written and produced by Eddie Seago, future author of Matador. But Da Vinci puts every available bucket of "emotion" into his performance, though the hoped climax, where he shrieks a "MORE!" in dog whistle territory, is so out of key that the entire edifice collapses. Still, it's a remarkable and probably unrepeatable record, and in Holland it outsold "Sugar Baby Love" by two to one.

19. Sweet Dreams - Honey Honey
The Abba original was never released as a single in Britain - and should have been - so cue the quickbuck homemade cover version. The lead singer is unmistakeably Polly Brown - but, shame of shames, she appeared on TOTP in blackface. This probably helped to torpedo her long-term solo career (not to mention killing stone dead her concurrent and genuinely ace single "Going Up In A Puff Of Smoke"), and also helps understand how completely justified this week's top three singles were (N.B.: the Sweet Dreams who performed the '83 Eurovision entry "I'm Never Giving Up" - an underperformer, both in the contest and in the charts - were a separate act entirely).

18. Intruders - (Win, Place Or Show) She's A Winner
Not played, perhaps fortunately; one of the less distinguished Philly sides where the group jauntily compare their other half to a racehorse. Oh dear.

17. Bobby Goldsboro - Hello Summertime
The successor to "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing" as the Coca Cola theme; British-written, British-produced, and a trite, unloveable Europe-only hit.

16. David Cassidy - Please Please Me
His last hit on Bell; a ragged live runthrough predating Take That and Westlife's similar "Beatles tribute sections" by a generation, and rather undermined by the fatality at his White City Stadium concert a couple of months previously.

15. Glitter Band - Just For You
Played, rather surprisingly, but then they were the gang, and not the leader, and this was one of their harder and better "solo" efforts - hello, inevitably, Denim.

14. Donny & Marie Osmond - I'm Leaving It All Up To You
Not played, presumably because the Osmonds' "Love Me For A Reason" (which eventually overtook Donny & Marie to the top) was spun as a new release. Still, Dale commented on their "lovely teeth." Quite.

13. Rubettes - Tonight
Ah yes, the "official" follow-up to "Sugar Baby Love" with the substantially less dynamic Alan Williams on lead vocal; some nice moments, but doesn't really recapture the magic, planned or accidental, of its predecessor, and nothing of the rampant hysteria of its competitor (see Paul Da Vinci above).

12. Paul McCartney & Wings - Band On The Run
Again, not played because they had that week's number one album, from which Dale played "Mrs Vanderbilt" - good song!

11. Sparks - Amateur Hour
Dale just didn't play this one, my favourite group of '74 boo hiss...still, hello Franz, and indeed, Ferdinand...

10. Rolling Stones - It's Only Rock 'N' Roll
The one where they're dressed as sailors and gradually drown in a bubble of Fairy Liquid foam. No one described the parent album as a Stunning Return To Form - apart from "Fingerprint File," it was truly duff - but in this song one's ear is drawn again and again to the marvellously creative guitar work of Mick Taylor, with Keef's harsh, proto-punk fuzz rhythm also prevalent; always they have something original to say in the context of a rather ordinary, by-the-book, self-referential Stones boogie.

9. Eric Clapton - I Shot The Sheriff
See comments on Marley's "Exodus" above.

8. Jimmy Ruffin - What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted?
Reissued as part of yet another Motown recycling/re-promotion campaign, except this time it was a slightly bigger hit (#4) than it had been in '66 (#6). A devastating portrait of ruination, of course (difficult with hindsight not to read post-Civil Rights/'Nam disillusion in lines like "As I walk this land of broken dreams") but Ruffin ends the song cautiously optimistic ("I'm gonna find a way/Nothin's gonna stop me now") - the ray of hope is never kept out of Motown for to long.

7. Mud - Rocket
The most sheerly enjoyable of their RAK 45s, principally because its premise is so absurd to begin with - a would-be movie starlet named, if you will, Abigail Rocketblast - and thus Les Gray's comedy Elvis routine actually works in the song's favour ("Second verse"). There's also a real verve and thrust about the band's delivery which betrays a genuinely good time making the record, though the double entendres are as groan-inducing as ever ("Rocket! I'm gonna launch you soon!").

(An interesting contrast here with the grim, suicidal aura of Hot Chocolate's similarly-themed "Emma" from a few months previously. The song was also subsequently covered by the Wedding Present)

6. Hues Corporation - Rock The Boat
There was as I recall some kerfuffle about whether the Hues Corporation or George McCrae came up with the Miami shuffle idea first. "Rock The Boat" is a fine record, of course, but it is efficient, whereas "Rock Your Baby" is visionary (see below). Somehow the electro contours of Forrest's Dutch 1983 cover suit the song a little better.

5. Stephanie De Sykes & Rain - Born With A Smile On My Face
I wrote substantially about this, and her, on Koons, and may republish it at some stage if there's sufficient interest, but to sum up with some dissolute signifiers - Crossroads, ATV, Birmingham, 1974, pub bombs but also Port Meadow, Central region, Laura aged nine - I've always liked the singer and the song, though have still to work out how exactly she's pronouncing "sunshine" and why.

4. Bay City Rollers - Summerlove Sensation
The third of Martin and Coulter's four identikit Rollers hits of '74; but it boosted the brand a little higher, and its aura of innocence (though clearly fake) can't really be detested. What is that strange gurgling speeded-up backing vocal which came in at every fadeout, though?

3. Stylistics - You Make Me Feel Brand New
Thom Bell's last gift to the group before he moved on, and the absolute apex of Philly soul, though it wasn't on Philadelphia International, and perhaps the absolute apex of many other things. The divine androgynous device of dividing the lead vocal by two, so it sounds like male and female, or the ego and id of one soul; yet it is also a prayer, as deeply heartfelt as those of the Platters or Robeson - its clumsy climactic verse (rhyming "friend" with "friend," "You're someone who I can depend") somehow manages to catch exactly the dissolute, not quite articulable joy of someone who knows that the flame of love is burning, who remains dazed but wishes to thank his Other so profusely, for saving him, for resurrecting him.

And how important that is, this week of all weeks.

It might be the greatest single ever made as of this moment.

But the single which kept it off number one might be the greatest single ever made as of the following moment.

2. George McCrae - Rock Your Baby
The magic lies in the fluidity which balances the drum machine; again this hymnal air with a touch of In A Silent Way - the interaction between Howie Casey's electric piano and Timmy Thomas' organ - and, once more, a vocal performance which could be either man or woman; it is so high because the singer feels so high on love, physical and spiritual. And for the subsequent thirty years of critics who moaned that the one thing you couldn't do with drum machines is make them swing - well, here's the principal proof that they can; the shuffle is lazy but propulsive, the momentum irresistible.

Yes, this is a record which truly marks - with its metronome - the beginning of time.

1. Three Degrees - When Will I See You Again?
An all-black top three (perhaps even the first?) - a long time coming, and absolutely and thoroughly justified; observers may care to note that the boom in mainstream soul sales mirrors almost exactly the expansion of the nascent commercial radio playlists of the period. While this is not as precious as either the McCrae or the Stylistics records, and I definitely preferred the dirtier Degrees of "Dirty Ol' Man," not to mention the Moroder Degrees of "Givin' Up, Givin' In" later on that decade, it again bears that air of the church ceremony; huge, solemn chords (but again made warm by Bobby Parker's undercurrent of Fender Rhodes) - this is "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" grown up and stranded in the international hotel lobby. A bit too Supremes bland for my taste, but a worthy chart-topper nonetheless.

Five years, and the answers have all now come to light.

Cracked it, haven't I, kid?

This song was offered to but turned doen by Jimmy Tarbuck as a 'theme' tune to come onstage to. Maybe that's why Frank Skinner used it for a while.

Mind you "The whole of my life's been a pantomime" always struck me as a line from a suicide note.

worst was "Woman In Love",the one that came between "Givin' Up, Givin' In" and "The Runner". it was a bigger hit than either. now if (say) Capital or Beacon had been available to as many people as the Simon Bates show ...

20. Billy Joel – It’s Still Rock ‘N’ Roll To Me
This’ll be the one which got Joel labelled an “angry punk rocker” by Patrick Bateman, or maybe that was “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” I didn’t quite see at the time why we should have been holding our collective breath to await Joel’s assessment of that punk rock thing, but his answer is in the title and the record isn’t that bad; as with “Uptown Girl” etc. Joel’s music works much more efficaciously when he realises that underneath it all he’s really America’s Gilbert O’Sullivan.

19. Clash – Bankrobber
Slightly pre-empting the Specials’ adventures into ska noir (those Gregorian JA backing vocals) but now mostly famous for Legs & Co’s “literal” interpretation of the song title on TOTP, and anyway Dale didn’t play it, being punk(ish) rock on a Sunday afternoon between Russell Davies’ Art Of Song and Johnnie Walker’s, er, Light Show.

18. Sheena Easton – Modern Girl
“She don’t build her world/Round no single man.” Very possibly the missing link between Opportunity Knocks and The X Factor, and certainly the first of the modern species of British reality TV pop stars, Sheena came from Bellshill, just the other side of the M8 from where I grew up, and at the beginning of the BBC Big Time documentary looked like a hopeful backing singer applying for a job with Supertramp. However, she was given a short back and sides plus suit and tie by EMI, who then set to work with the kind of MoR pop which could only be termed modernist by the date on its label. Thus on “Modern Girl” we get standard 1980 cheapo Moogs and a vague mist of “futurism” but the song is a lump of Spar cheddar cheese which could equally have been a #34 hit for the Chanter Sisters in 1975. Not played because she had another one further up the list.

17. Village People – Can’t Stop The Music
It’s August 1980, and Tommy Vance is co-presenting TOTP with Roger Daltrey.
TV: “Now, Roger-uhhh, do you like disco-uhhh?”
RD: “No, Tommy, I bloody hate it!”
TV: “Well, that’s a shame-uhhh, because here are the Village People and You Can’t Stop The Music-uhhh.”
Reissues and remixes aside, this was their last British hit.
I do miss old Tommy Vance, you know. He deserved a better swansong than Dickhead Drivers on Channel Five.

16. Tom Browne – Funkin’ For Jamaica (N.Y.)
Ahhhhh, that’s more like it – the jazz-funk trumpeter, of course, not the erstwhile presenter of Radio 1’s Solid Gold Sixty Top 40 Sunday rundown. One of those ineffable funk records which made the first few summers of the ‘80s that little bit more magical; nearly absent from itself apart from the groove, Brown’s Milesian commentary, the throaty and sinewy chorus, and voices echoing, chatting and laughing from all four sides. The first example on this list on how the creative use of space can make dance music that crucial atom more radiant – though, again, Dale missed it out.

15. Electric Light Orchestra – All Over The World
Not played, presumably because Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic,” also from the Xanadu soundtrack, was spun as a new release, but coincidence number one: Lena and I heard this playing as we pottered about on Brighton Pier Saturday teatime, and we both commented on (a) the unmistakable biscuit tin drums of Bev “Bev” Bevan, and (b) WTF was Gene Kelly thinking of when he agreed to appear in Xanadu?

14. Cliff Richard – Dreamin’
Not bad, but one of the weaker links in his otherwise unbreakable chain of classic singles between 1976-81.

13. Hazel O’Connor – Eighth Day
“On the eighth day machine just got upset.” The Punk Film Star without whom there surely would have been no The Knife does her RADA Poly Styrene routine atop an old Camel backing track and beats Toyah to the Top 40 by six full months.

12. George Benson – Give Me The Night
The second example on this list of how dance music is made three-dimensional by the use of space and echo, a defining characteristic of Quincy Jones, who brought to the song’s parent album the same scarce magic that he bestowed on Off The Wall, but since Benson didn’t go mad, people forget.

11. Roxy Music – (Oh Yeah) On The Radio
Not played, but then Flesh And Blood was that week’s number one album and Dale did spin their take on “In The Midnight Hour,” a presumed salute to Ferry’s Gas Board days, but possibly the whitest record ever made with the possible exception of Japan’s “I Second That Emotion.”

10. Mike Berry – The Sunshine Of Your Smile
The ex-Joe Meek recording artist turned Are You Being Served? co-star made a surprising comeback with a careful reading of a song as old as its century which makes one utter, involuntarily, the words “medication time.”

9. Gap Band – Oops! Upside Your Head
“Just because you don’t believe that you wanna dance/Don’t mean that you don’t want to.” A clear precedent, we now know, of everything Jam and Lewis went on to create, as with most of Lonnie Simmons’ work of the period, it’s remembered for the rowing boat dancefloor routine but gloriously and continually stops short of falling into disrepair – there is an organic, probably Clinton-derived, feel to the groove (though it also presages the rise of electronic beats), and though the 12-inch of “Burn Rubber On Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)” remains their masterpiece, the 12-inch of this should certainly not be abandoned in the attic.

8. Gary Numan – I Die: You Die
One of many Numan hits of the ‘80s, he said hurriedly, and the extended mourning of the instrumental coda is really the only aspect which distinguishes this record from, say, “We Are Glass.”

7. Diana Ross – Upside Down
OK, she could make good records when pushed, and the Motown mix is better than the original Chic mix, and OK, Motown were so sorely on their uppers that they were reduced to hiring their biggest competitors to score a hit, but this was Ross’ biggest British hit since “I’m Still Waiting” and deservedly so; the song and arrangement veer in and out of synch with each other in keeping with the lyric’s woozy delirium of indecision. “Respectfully I say to thee” – where, outside of OutKast and perhaps Prince, do you find that kind of lyric in contemporary black pop?

6. Piranhas – Tom Hark
Strangely this was on something of a loop in a corner of Gatwick Airport this morning. Comedy skapocalypse cover of the Elias and his Zig Zag Jive Flutes ’58 Kwela crossover smash, viz.: “The whole thing’s daft/I don’t know why/You have to laugh/Or else you cry.” Whatever became of Boring Bob Grover?

5. Kelly Marie – Feels Like I’m In Love
Another one Lena heard for the first time on Brighton Pier on Saturday (clearly off one of those Best Of The Faintly Naff ‘80s compilations); the Paisley songstress squeaking her way through forests of Woolworth’s syndrums with this unlikely Hi-NRG crossover written by the even more unlikely Ray Dorset Out Of Mungo Jerry. We thought its air of gleeful lightness was quite apposite for the youthful exuberance we were both feeling!

4. Abba – The Winner Takes It All
Their penultimate British number one, and the real start of their final era of closeted darkness; do the grandiosity and evident emotional sincerity of Agnetha’s delivery justify Bjorn writing a lyric about their divorce and handing it to his ex-wife, impassively? How far does an artist have to be hurt in order to produce great art? And unfortunately “The Winner Takes It All” is great art. I will have to think about this harder.

3. Sheena Easton – 9 To 5
As I recall, the first female singer since Connie Francis to have two singles in the UK Top 20 simultaneously (corrections to the usual address please). Far more sprightly than “Modern Girl” and retitled “My Baby Takes The Morning Train” in the States to avoid confusion with the Dolly Parton hit. However, neither is as good as “Sugar Walls” which typically missed the British charts altogether.

2. Jam – Start!
“Taxman”! But better!

1. David Bowie – Ashes To Ashes
“Space Oddity”! But gloomier!

Which is what it was first time out. Then they screened the documentary, and both that and her new single were simultaneous hits.

19. Clash – Bankrobber.

Peel played this on pre-release, but the record kept skipping - which didn't stop me taping it and playing it many times over. I can still hear where the skips are supposed to go.

18. Sheena Easton – Modern Girl.

Camera Obscura's recent baleful, downtempo cover re-contextualises the lyric most delightfully. I loved the dialectic of Sheena's first three singles: thesis/antithesis/synthesis, AND each song title began with consecutive letters of the alphabet! Brilliant!

17. Village People – Can’t Stop The Music.

"It's the music of the Eighties! Everybody's looking for it, and we've found it!" Gotta love that movie...

16. Tom Browne – Funkin’ For Jamaica (N.Y.)

See also "Fungi Mama" (which had a re-release of this on its B-side), an extended tease of track which seems perpetually on the brink of exploding into full-on euphoric salsa carnival meltdown - but never quite gets there. (And then, bizarrely, he went electro with "Rockin' Radio".)

14. Cliff Richard – Dreamin’.

In August 1980, I was Interrail-ing solo round Europe for a month. In filthy stinking Marseille, I ate some unwashed fruit and ended up stuck at their fetid cesspool of a railway station for six hours with the squirting shits, waiting for a connection to Rotterdam and the only people I knew in mainland Europe. As soon as I got to their lovely bright clean spacious Northern European apartment, they ran me a hot bath in their lovely bright clean spacious Northern European bathroom, and left me in there with the radio on. The first song that played was Cliff Richard's lovely bright clean spacious Northern European "Dreamin'", and I have loved it without reservation ever since.

12. George Benson – Give Me The Night.

Every now and then, I make the wrong set of snobbish associations and miss out on something palpably great. I did it with Rave, and I did it with George Benson's Give Me The Night. Curly-permed footballers sometimes get it right after all shockah!

9. Gap Band – Oops! Upside Your Head.

This was known for a while on import as "I Don't Believe That You Want To Get Up And Dance", and my white-sox-n-loafers Essex soulboy workmate had been raving about it for weeks and weeks before it charted. (See also Stacy Lattisaw "Jump To The Beat", Freeez "Keep In Touch".)

7. Diana Ross – Upside Down.

Spring 1984 in Berlin, and our favourite bleeding-edge hip after-hours club abruptly junked the post-punk & proto-goth in favour of James Brown, Earth Wind & Fire, late 70s disco in general, and this song in particular, in one of the shortest paradigm-shifting revival cycles I have ever witnessed.

5. Kelly Marie – Feels Like I’m In Love.

Not only written by Ray Dorset out of Mungo Jerry, but also written specifically for Elvis Presley, who died before it could be recorded. Strange but true (and since this was told to me by a former member of Mungo Jerry, than I have no option but to believe it).

2. Jam – Start!.

Like the P{et Shop Boys "Heart", this is the Number One Jam single that no-one ever talks about - which makes it even more of a personal favourite. ("It doesn't matter if we never meet again /
What we have said will always remain / If we get through for two minutes only / It will be a start." God, those formative one-night stands didn't half do my head in...)

20. St Cecilia – Leap Up And Down (And Wave Your Knickers In The Air)
Note that “quite.” Jonathan King trying it again, and guess what: Dale didn’t play it (in common with most radio stations at the time). Also curiously absent from JK’s otherwise exhaustive 8CD box set King Of Hits, presumably because he didn’t “perform” the track (though Hedgehoppers Anonymous and the Angelettes are both present and correct on same).

19. Supremes – Nathan Jones
At this stage, still hipper than solo Diana, and a great slice of post-psychedelic pop-soul, complete with phasing. The 1988 Bananarama/SAW take wasn’t half bad, but the original remains the best.

18. Elvis Presley – Heartbreak Hotel/Hound Dog
Another of the RCA Maximillion series of reissues; not played, but inevitably far more lively than what he actually was doing in 1971.

17. Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood – Did You Ever?
Late-period lightweight Nancy & Lee, “Did You Ever?” could be considered a 12-certificate “Je T’Aime.” Its double entendre set-up no doubt attracted the Benny Hill/Carry On following (and hence no doubt its number two peak position, Nancy’s biggest British hit since “Somethin’ Stupid”) but the humour is so good and the electricity between the two so palpable – they struggle manfully to keep a straight face through the final verse – that it’s irresistible.

16. Gilbert O’Sullivan – We Will
At his best, he was the Alan Bennett of pop; and my comparison is in specific reference to the increasingly downbeat series of television plays Bennett wrote (and the young Stephen Frears directed) throughout the seventies – things like A Day Out, Afternoon Off and One Fine Day; films where nothing happens, as such, but there is the persisting evening shade of imminent apocalypse, that this approach to living was about to approach its extinction. Thus the terrible warning which comes in the middle of O’Sullivan’s reverie of second childishness: “It’s not easy to pretend that you cannot hear/Once you’ve suffered the affliction from within.” Surrounding this are the fragments of what could be any ordinary day in any Northern village – the kids racing into the house with muddy boots (“Take off your shoes/The both of youse” - and yes Kate Bush and her washing machine spring to mind – “Turn the landing light off…no, wait, leave it on!/It might make the night/That much easier to be gone”), the distant relatives who live only to see these same children, the unspecified third party (their dad?) reluctant to play football other than as goalie (“Bagsy me in goal”) – but also the sense that there is something they’re all circling around, something they perhaps dare not mention.

It is a record for Sunday afternoons, including my own seven-year-old Sunday afternoons; the encroaching apricot sunset coming up behind the Grammar, closed printers’ works and department stores, comics and crisps. But that sunset is omnipresent throughout this record, such that you feel O’Sullivan is appending a question mark to the end of its title.

15. The Who – Won’t Get Fooled Again
One of two goodbyes to the sixties in this list, and by far the more brutal; the rainbows and feedback vanish to be replaced by seventies cold rationalism, and this is the Who’s last great Valhalla of a roar – Quadrophenia is really not much more than an over-extended footnote – as encapsulated in their TOTP performance of the song; Moon gleefully mock-bashing his kit and mugging at the camera and not even bothering to pretend he’s not miming; Townshend in bearded, permed denim but still summoning up the energy for that great windmill leap; Mod dead, never never never…

14. Curtis Mayfield – Move On Up
…never. The Impressions were the Mods’ favourite soul group, too cool ever to make the UK singles chart (except with “First Impressions” in 1975, long after Mayfield had departed), and “Move On Up” became a Northern Soul perennial, but only after it had been a hit. Thinking of Laura’s last works Christmas do; back in 2000; she borrowed one of our Northern Soul compilations and asked the DJ there to play “Move On Up,” and then nobody danced except her and her boss. But that was then; and now “Move On Up” is the beginning of a new time.

13. New World – Tom Tom Turnaround
Not played; earnest Australian bearded pop-folk trio who won Opportunity Knocks and are the Chinn/Chapman act which time forgot.

12. Curved Air – Back Street Luv
A number four hit! What salad days they were! Of course its success depended in part upon it being the first picture disc single – as its parent album, Airconditioning, was the first mass circulation picture disc LP; I remember James Mossman commenting on the phenomenon on BBC2’s Review programme, a couple of weeks before he killed himself.

Anyway “Back Street Luv” is a fucking great single; sensual and sexy with spermatozoa of Moog splutter and austere Hammond, slow and penetrating, Sonja Kristina sounding like the missing link between Julie Driscoll and Siouxsie Sioux (it’s all in the pacing of her voice). It would be nicely convenient to link it up as a Moebius strip with the Police’s success at the end of the seventies, but as I recall Stewart Copeland didn’t come into Curved Air until ’75 or thereabouts; so that’s that, then.

11. George Harrison – Bangla Desh
Not played; can’t say the programme suffered from its absence.

10. T. Rex – Get It On
Yes, if I’d been old enough in 1971 to know what being turned on involved, I would have been driven fucking mental by Marc Bolan and his “teeth of the Hydra upon you,” those English “a”s in “let’s dAnce, take a chAnce,” and especially his “you’re dirty sweet and you’re my girl.” Certainly in 1975, when I was equally stimulated by Freddie Mercury looking like a girl and Patti Smith in Mapplethorpe suit and tie, it, and he, would have hit the spot. But this was, and is, rock and roll as life, and as with all Bolan’s best singles – and his best singles were among the best of any singles – the drive is sleek and the arrangement cleverly falling just the right side of sloppy. Think of the hip-crouching pauses in the track, Tony Visconti’s Chinese Opera string section, Rick Wakeman’s zipping and unzipping piano, the burbling, rumbling sax spires of Ian McDonald (the King Crimson/Centipede/Foreigner one) and those utterly androgynous Flo and Eddie backing vocals; yessssssss…as far as number ones go, it’s ten to the power of…?

9. Atomic Rooster – Devil’s Answer
One marvels that in 1971 some adventurous British rock bands were still issuing singles as a matter of course and having huge hits with them; thus the group who, because of Tony Blackburn’s lax pronunciation, I thought for two weeks was a bloke called Tommy Brewster peaked at number four with this really rather fine R&B-going-prog rocker; with its excitable horns and the late, great Vincent Crane’s organ (see also that marvellous quiet pause in the record’s dead centre), it’s a bit like Jethro Tull jamming with Amen Corner. And its lyrics sum up the sentiments of Thick As A Brick with considerably greater concision.

8. Carole King – It’s Too Late
She only ever had two British hit singles as a performer – as opposed to the innumerable hits she’s had as a songwriter – and indeed Tapestry stayed on the album chart for pretty well the whole of the seventies. But are there two hit singles so different as “It Might As Well Rain Until September” and “It’s Too Late” performed by the same artist? Nine years separated the two, of course, and by the time of Tapestry King had begun to look back ruefully, but not hopelessly, at the old days, but used her knowledge to try to move things, and herself, on. The teenage Carole who wrote “Oh Neil” in response to her then boyfriend’s “Oh Carol” could never have summoned the zestful maturity of the woman who sings and glides through “I Feel The Earth Move” (and indeed, same said ex-boyfriend was inspired by her example to stage his own imminent dramatic comeback).

“It’s Too Late,” though, is Carole King serenely facing the demon of her own marriage break-up (with Gerry Goffin); the ticking clock of doom is remorseless under the careful piano chords and Tom Scott’s regretful soprano sax curlicues, but we’re adults now, aren’t we, we can handle this all with maturity and dignity, oh no oh fuck I’m going to crawl into a corner and bawl my eyes out as soon as I’ve finished this song – “how much I once loved you.” She sings it like she’s handing down her own death sentence.

7. Buffy Sainte-Marie – Soldier Blue
“Such a potent song, such a powerful performance,” remarked Winton, and he was right…even in this relatively elevated company, “Soldier Blue” stands out as starkly as, say, Kristin Hersh’s “Delicate Cutters” would have done in a 1986 Top 20. There is a natural authority and indestructible passion in Buffy’s voice which makes even the best of these other records seem like the work of children in comparison. And, yes, it sold because of the film, but even so, it is an indisputably genuine cry of grief and anger on behalf of those who were sentenced to lose the war the winners started; read Charles Shaar Murray’s 1976 NME interview with Buffy in the context of his anthology, Shots From The Hip, and you feel a realness screamingly absent from the Stoned meanderings of most of his other interviewees of the period; her art cuts through bullshit and mock sentimentality like an axe through poisoned jelly. “Oh, this is MY country…don’t you know there’s another way to love her?” she sings to the Unknown Soldier (and yes, that was another one of hers) and it sounds as though she sang it two hours ago. It is depressing how relevant this song and performance, and this artist, remain right now, at this deluded moment in history.

6. Pioneers – Let Your Yeah Be Yeah
Pleasant enough pop-reggae with those ubiquitous Willesden Sound strings.

5. Dawn featuring Tony Orlando – What Are You Doing Sunday?
The first Dawn hit with a separate Orlando credit – I mean, really, did anyone seriously think Dawn was an actual GROUP and not just Orlando plus backing singers? – and as crappy as all of their other ones; studium bubblegum which did help build Pulp’s “Disco 2000” but is stale, smug and lifeless; in close proximity to “Soldier Blue” it sounds positively pornographic, in a white-America-fiddles-while-the-rest-of-the-world-burns kind of way, which is more or less the worst kind of way (yes I know Orlando’s Puerto Rican roots and that the backing singers were black, but these songs were written and produced by rich white folks…).

4. Family – In My Own Time
“AAAAAH AHHHHHHHH AAAAAAAHHHH AAAAAHH!!”
Pardon?
“AAAAAH AHHHHHHHH AAAAAAAHHHH AAAAAHH!!”
It’s one of the most startling intros to any pop single (CUTOFF!! CUTOFF!!), and this intro of vocal vomit is immediately succeeded by these ominous tom-tom rolls, jerky guitar and this bloody, bloodied voice, this Roger Chapman, this Family…

…and this Family were and are one of the main reasons I rolled my eyes in bored despair at the Reading Festival footage on Saturday late night BBC2; all these polite young bands (no, Broken Social Scene weren’t on the programme, or I fell asleep before they came on) not wanting to disturb their complacent paymasters. Only Ben Crow, a.k.a. Plan B, hunched over his black hole of an acoustic and not in front of an audience, approached anything of the duende of Roger Chapman with Family; Chapman is one of the genuine madmen to have come our way during this story of rock, straight-backed and epileptic, trashing microphones and tambourines like chewing gum wrappers, eyes of wilderness, Ian Curtis’ unfunny uncle, or, as he comes from Leicester, the brother Joe Orton kept locked in the attic.

And Family were one of the greatest of British rock groups; please do me a favour, right now, and go and listen to Music From A Doll’s House, from 1968 if I may remind so, and then come back and tell me that the Zutons are “adventurous.” Then consider that they had a fair run of hit singles in addition to their hit albums, and that something as unhinged but controlled as “In My Own Time” could get to NUMBER FOUR at one point in the history of the world. It thrashes itself and backs up on itself, runs itself over and finally runs down, like a plug being suddenly pulled out of a wall newly decorated by the local firing squad. “I’ll be with you in my own time!” squeals and bleats Chapman demonically, rocking to no one but himself. It is very nearly not human.

3. Tams – Hey Girl, Don’t Bother Me
Northern Soul’s biggest seller, and although it was recorded in 1964 it sounds as though it escaped in part from 1944; the Tams were already middle-aged by the time they performed the song on TOTP, and the vocal timbres and harmonies – not to mention that clarinet which pops up in the middle eight – seem to derive directly from the Mills Brothers, as though they’d somehow bypassed doo wop entirely. And they got to number one, anyway – good for them.

2. New Seekers – Never Ending Song Of Love
The Seekers rebranding enjoyed its first major success with this oompah-oompah folky-schmolky singsong redeemed only by a curious mid-record break of vocal harmonies and echoing percussion which might have come straight from the SMiLE mixing desk. Then played at 78 rpm by mistake.

1. Diana Ross – I’m Still Waiting

“He could see I had no eyes/So he left me.”
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”

It was only ever meant to be an album track, and UK Motown only rush-released it as a single after Blackburn had been playing it to death on Radio 1, but along with the calculatedly nostalgic “Chain Reaction,” it remains Ross’ biggest British hit. And in its own way it’s a sad farewell to Motown as the sixties had known it, a reluctant procession to adulthood while the singer remains wilfully imprisoned in her childishness. The boy was her only “real” love, and then his folks decide to move away, and take the boy with them, and thus indirectly fuck Diana Ross up. Because she “grows” but she can’t relinquish the ghosts of her past, can’t face new challenges, and more importantly, newer and brighter promises of love; they might as well have slashed her throat at ten. So the only option she has left herself is to wait, as pointlessly and fatally as Cohen does in “Waiting For A Miracle,” and the worst of it is that she knows that she’s systematically killing herself, slowly, by closing all the doors inwardly upon her, until they form her coffin.

With me, it wasn’t so much a case of waiting for the miracle; it was a case of waiting for the smoke and mist to clear in my eyes, before I realised that it was down to me to clear them away…and I looked out of my window, upon the world, and there she was; smiling and patient and persistent and loving, with her bugle and her drum.

There are 4 very GREAT records in this chart : The Supremes (presumably the Jean Terrell/Cindy Birdsong/Mary Wilson line-up?), The Who, The Tams and Diana Ross.

I don't recall either Buffy or Carole appearing on TOTP so suspect that it was left to Pan's People to *interpret* both (I shudder to think).

Yep it was the Terrell/Birdsong/Wilson Supremes, Frank Wilson writing and producing; Diana had to wait until the Chic stuff until she even approached the hipness of the early '70s Supremes - a shame they didn't stay the course; Whitfield could have worked wonders with them.

He still looks like that (in panto, 3 years ago)...

Yeah, I remember Aspel.

20. Jimmy Justice – Spanish Harlem
Then again…the unfortunately-named Mr Justice carved a brief career out of being a British substitute for Ben E King. If nothing else his earnest vocal emphasises just how difficult the song is to sing properly (get those breathing pauses sorted out) and the orchestration is appropriately Brit-clunky; Plas Johnson’s fleet, hip soprano sax replaced by a terrible, tremulous sub-Eddie Calvert trumpet; skyscrapers suppressed in preference of prefabs.

19. Nat “King” Cole & George Shearing – Let There Be Love
Infinitely hipper and more authentic than Jimmy Justice, needless to say, but unfortunately long since fatally undermined by four decades’ worth of bad Bruce Forsyth impressions and being the unwitting standard bearer of Michael Parkinson’s Idea Of Real Music.

18. Mike Sarne – Will I What?
Soundalike cheeky chappie (God help us) follow-up to “Come Outside” but with Billie Davis standing in for Wendy Richard, and there’s a nice turning of the tables on the grotty geezer at the end of the song which almost makes it the ancestor to “Promiscuous Girl.” Co-written, unbelievably, by the young John Carter.

17. Tornados - Telstar
Whereas this had to be believed to be heard, or imagined. It was on its way up from 36 the previous week, towards transatlantic number one status in the week of the Cuban missile crisis. I’ve said enough about it on previous occasions elsewhere, and was even asked by A Well-Known Television Station to talk about it in the context of one of their list shows – an offer I declined when I saw the conditions under which I would have had to do the talking. For the future which, against all odds, it might still promise, despite the fate of its creators, I still consider it the greatest of all number ones. Especially in this context.

16. Ray Charles – I Can’t Stop Loving You
Although here was another of the great number ones – I didn’t realise that the main reason Uncle Ray insisted on releasing it as a single was to stop Tab Hunter’s note-for-note cover version in its tracks. That certainly brings a new dimension to the spectre of the oppressed singing and reclaiming the music of their oppressors. Arguably more radical than Coltrane making a raga out of “My Favourite Things.”

15. Kenny Ball & his Jazzmen – So Do I
14. Lonnie Donegan – Pick A Bale Of Cotton
Two different approaches to reviving old foreign music. Ball comes on like a spiv salesman, hissing through his moustachioed lips: “You like jazz more than Liszt” just so he had something to rhyme with “kissed.” Turn-of-the-century Louisiana reduced to a novelty duck on the village green pond at Cobham.

It was Lonnie’s last hit, and he probably knew it; its run overlapped with that of “Love Me Do.” So he completed the circle and went back to the Leadbelly source; Denny Wright, the hero of “Cumberland Gap,” back on lead guitar; and more spirited and alive than Donegan had sounded in years.

13. Adam Faith – Don’t That Beat All
John Barry now being too busy with Bond, this was Faith’s first record with Johnny Keating as arranger and it is bloody weird; a bluegrass fiddle saws surrealistically throughout (cf. “Don’t Pass Me By” by the Beatles – was this Jack Fallon again?), the arrangement is all over the place (dig those harp/bass harmonica unison lines!) and the singer himself doesn’t seem to be taking it at all seriously (“Sing the sad, sad story!” he mock-sobs halfway through). What the hell were they all on?

12. Jet Harris – Main Title Theme From The Man With The Golden Arm
Marking time between quitting the Shadows and reuniting with Meehan, Harris tries the Duane Eddy approach, but again the ludicrous and very British orchestration lets him down; whereas the trumpets on Billy May’s 1956 hit version SCREAM, here we have muted brass and flutes which make us think less of hopeless drug addiction and more of The Harry Worth Show, though there’s a nice little flute improvisation (by Tubby Hayes) near the end.

11. Billy Fury – Once Upon A Dream
From the film Play It Cool, directed by Michael Winner – where were Tony Richardson or Lindsay Anderson when they were needed? – another in the lengthy conveyor belt of ballads to which Fury gives a far better vocal performance than they deserve.

10. Duane Eddy – Ballad Of Paladin
Main title theme from Have Gun, Will Travel, a TV series which even I can’t remember (though my mum does). Eddy has to struggle to be heard through yet another bizarre orchestration (those Viking French horns!) but since this was Lee Hazlewood’s work we can assume that the derangement was intended.

9. Shadows – Guitar Tango
The fourth instrumental to appear in this chart (what a difference the Beatles made, part 38452) and the first Shadows single to feature Hank Marvin on acoustic lead guitar. Again, the rather stiff orchestration seems glued on (lots of trumpets paying homage to Old Catalonia etc.) but I’ve always had a sneaking affection for the record, even though in the era of Dick Dale’s “Misirlou” it seems pretty tame.

8. Neil Sedaka – Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
The Todd Rundgren of post-Elvis/pre-Beatles pop; all vocals, including “female” backing vocals, by him; ditto most of the instruments. I believe it’s still the only instance of two entirely separate recordings of the same song by the same artist to hit number one in America – the vastly superior 1975 ballad reading didn’t chart at all in Britain (here, the second coming of Sedaka was principally as an Albums Artist).

7. Cliff Richard – It’ll Be Me
A surprisingly convincing take on the old Jerry Lee rocker; Cliff sounds worked up for once, and note how Marvin’s stinging guitar responds to the singer’s evident enthusiasm immediately.

6. Pat Boone – Speedy Gonzales
Very nearly his last hit, good clean Pat has a laugh at foreign people in a pre-Pinochet kind of a way.

5. Brian Hyland – Sealed With A Kiss
4. Bobby Darin – Things
Two different ways of interpreting separation and loss. We know that Hyland is playing the part of a lovesick teenager, that he and his beloved will meet again in September; yet there is an emptiness drifting audibly through “Sealed With A Kiss” – the ghostly choir, the abandoned harmonica – which is of the same rank as “Johnny Remember Me” and “Ghost Town.” To the young man, two months apart feels like death, even though he knows he will live again, and soon (note how the record ends on a major key).

“Things,” however, is arguably a more disturbing record because of its relentlessly chirpy and upbeat setting, with its cooing backing singers and comforting marimbas. Yet Darin sings it like a defeated Hank Williams (was there ever a triumphant Hank?), slouching behind the beat reluctantly, and it’s clear that in listing the things that were good about their relationship (and not so good – note the silence which greets “WHAT ABOUT THE NIGHT WE CRIED?”) he is in mourning; note the past tense of “how much I loved you,” implying that this isn’t just a voluntary parting of the ways, and the utter desolation of the final verse – how his voice nearly rips itself apart in grief while surfing the “bo” part of the word “nobody” in the line “there’s nobody else around.”

3. Ronnie Carroll – Roses Are Red
Another Brit quick-buck cover of another American chart-topper (Bobby Vinton), the only difference being that Carroll, though still a relatively young lad, sounds about ninety years old singing it. And it’s about loss and missed chances once again; they drift apart after school, he meets her years later with her little girl, pondering on how the doomed cycle is doomed to repeat itself forever.

2. Frank Ifield – I Remember You
Ah, the happy yodeller indeed, celebrating a 1962 still full of promises of sunny futures; Harry Pitch’s harmonica is as cheerful as Ifield’s yodels, and it helps to have such a clever song to sing – the title suggests lost love, but Johnny Mercer’s lyric astutely plays with the notion of time until you realise that the singer is celebrating NOW (the key phrase being “a few kisses ago”). Not really my bag of swag, but such good cheer you wish the world could have stayed like this forever.

1. Elvis Presley – She’s Not You
Also top of the album charts with Pot Luck (it was a soundtrack album, as opposed to what an Elvis album entitled Pot Luck released in, say, 1975 might have sounded like) and another of those annoyingly jaunty but bland sweater pop by numbers with which Presley enjoyed such inexplicable success in ’62 (see also “Good Luck Charm,” “Return To Sender” and the nearest mug of Horlicks…).

(relegating the film to a bracket)

Maybe it was the main title theme to The Jet Harris Show, if such a thing existed; with special guest stars Carol Deene, Michael Holliday and Norman Vaughan?

but fantastic work, obviously. I can only attempt such things.

20. Herman’s Hermits – Sunshine Girl
Unless very high up in the featured chart, Dale hardly ever plays any of the Hermits’ many interchangeable hits when they occur. John Carter co-wrote this one, but then you could say the same of Mike Sarne’s “Will I What?”

19. Doors – Hello, I Love You
Terrible, bowdlerised “All Day And All Of The Night” ripoff. I did like “Touch Me” a lot, but otherwise am content to listen to Jim Morrison’s voice only in the context of Fatboy Slim’s “Bird Of Prey.” When your head’s full of the Seeds and the 13th Floor Elevators, this just sounds so – polite.

18. Des O’Connor – I Pretend
Wasn’t this on the last time POTP did ’68? It must have been, since it wasn’t played today. Then again it was on the charts for nine months. Even Des has never understood its success.

17. Status Quo – Ice In The Sun
Follow-up to “Matchstick Men” with that little psych-lite glockenspiel icicle swirling over the chorus. A rare opportunity to hear Rick Parfitt sing (he does the middle eight, including the words “I am weak” – quite). Written by Marty Wilde, and not the last Marty Wilde song to appear in this list.

16. Mason Williams – Classical Gas
He was musical director of the Smothers Brothers Show, and co-wrote “Cinderella Rockerfella” but is best remembered for this oddity which, as I’ve remarked in at least two other places, is beguiling mainly because it sounds like a lost Forever Changes backing track.

15. Otis Redding – Hard To Handle
The second posthumous hit. Revisiting Otis Blue recently, I was struck by the record’s balance between grit and sophistication, particularly as how it was recorded in one 24-hour marathon session (producer Tom Dowd flew out to Memphis on the Friday and delivered the masters first thing Monday morning), but also at the organic quality of the music which is one of the most remarkable things about Stax at their peak; as with Mingus, nothing was written down – Otis would work up a song (with lyric) from scratch while jamming with the MGs, then sing the desired arrangement, complete with harmonies, to the Memphis Horns. Despite being a hit fully ten months after his death, “Hard To Handle” is a superb example of living music; listen to all those fills Steve Cropper puts in and how Al Jackson’s drums and Booker T’s piano pick up on them and react immediately.

14. Tom Jones – Help Yourself
What a contrast to Jones the Groans, who had this week’s number one album with Delilah, from which was spun his glutinous slaughter of “Just Out Of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms).” However, it did spare me from having to endure this ghastly package tour with painted grin of a record with its scripted and unutterably mirthless “yeah!” just before the second verse, together with a lyric which suggests (“Love is like candy on the shelf”) that Jones was auditioning for the role of Chance the gardener.

13. Leapy Lee – Little Arrows
Early Albert Hammond; an irksomely chirpy beat tune which could have been as equally big a hit, with minimal changes in arrangement, in 1962. Mr Lee went on to do time inside, for reasons I have long since forgotten.

12. Mama Cass – Dream A Little Dream Of Me
I was extremely disappointed that Dale didn’t play this, since it’s one of my favourite records and corresponds emotionally to numbers ten and four below (at least in my world). What a wonderful vocal from Ms (he!) Elliot; playful but embracing, astute but sincere, with that nice spontaneity of the studio chatter at the beginning and end – a song older than any of us, but a timeless performance with some tremendous whistling at fadeout; and I am touched by the emotions which the song describes, since Cass makes it sound like a succulent prayer. A record which frequently comes to mind as I say goodnight to her, eight thousand miles away but her spirit right next to me and within me.

11. Amen Corner – High In The Sky
It may be that Mr Fairweather-Low and the boys were trying for a Stax sound here, but the song is fairly flimsy post-psych bubblegum to which the typically pained lead vocal proves most unhelpful.

10. Herb Alpert – This Guy’s In Love With You
Oh, dear, the perils of Sunday afternoon pre-recorded broadcasts; someone slept and briefly got their tapes mixed up, so I’m guessing that Dale did play this. I don’t have anything to add to what I said about the record here (my own personal favourite thread in all of ILx) – it is pure magic; the frailty of Alpert’s voice, the shyness, humility and depth of emotion which it conceals, how Bacharach’s piano and orchestra try to help him open up, and that unbearable silence which greets the hushed scream “if not I will…die.” Again, a prayer, and the first of two Bacharach/David-engendered prayers in this top ten.

9. Gary Puckett & the Union Gap – Lady Willpower
“Young Girl” follow-up and soundalike, and arguably even creepier; from the tenor of the lyric, it’s as if Our Gary has simply waited for her to grow up and tried again a couple of years (or weeks?) later. Icky.

8. Canned Heat – On The Road Again
Blues as raga drone; as Dale remarked of the number one, “It sounds like it could go on forever…and in a funny way, it has.” Even in the context of post-psychedelic burnout/blues boom in ’68 this is a very singular and compelling single.

7. Johnny Nash – Hold Me Tight
As I said, the kind of melodic reggae with nice strings which Tony Blackburn preferred. Immaculately produced but bland beyond endurance; you can grasp from this why people would want a drop of the harder stuff a few months later.

6. Casuals – Jessamine
The second Marty Wilde song, and the first of two Opportunity Knocks winners in this list; another slightly overwrought ballad sitting in the post-psych bubblegum slipstream (“A butterfly child/So free and so wild”) whose chorus manages to rhyme “living” with “living,” but whose general disconnected air gives the suggestion that perhaps “Jessamine” is something other than a person. Arguably, Wilde’s own “Up The Hill To Abergavenny” from this period is considerably weirder; unbelievable that it hasn’t yet been compiled on CD.

5. Beach Boys – Do It Again
One of four past, present or future number ones in this top five, Mike and Brian look back ruefully at memories spent and chances fudged or squandered, but with such good humour – and still much invention in production and arrangement terms; with that opening drumbeat I’m still expecting “Remember” by Air – that it’s hard to deny them this success, especially as it only managed #20, with difficulty, in the States.

4. Aretha Franklin – I Say A Little Prayer
She lives her everyday life in full knowledge of why she’s living it. She’ll play the game – running for the bus, taking her time at work, wondering what dress to wear now – and will tolerate the daily petty irritations and inconveniences because it is all serving a greater good. Throughout everything she never surrenders her soul or spirit. She prays for him; his love, his very being, their present and their long and happy future. She prays so they might live.

The dialogue between Aretha’s solo lead and the choir is instructive as it defines the boundaries between day-to-day practical reality (all those details) and the emotions which are sustained within her and ensure her survival. Finally, her voice opens up in the purest of joys; you think that the record is about to fade out, but no, here comes one last chorus, stronger than any of the previous ones, and her spirit cries in ecstasy from the rooftops of the city: “For me there is no ONE but you!”

It describes how I live every day, because that is what I am doing every second of every day, praying for her, for us, for the future of loving and nurturing and healing now on our doorstep, because in truth I am speaking only to her, writing this only for her…still the emotions are universal and apparent, and few records sum them up so concisely and beautifully as this one.

3. Bee Gees – I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You
Sort of the missing link between “Distant Drums” – he’s, er, gotta get a message to her – and “I Did What I Did For Maria,” insofar as he’s killed a man and is about to hang. Melodramatic pop which, though clearly far superior to conveyor belt jobs like “Jessamine” – it keeps building until the camera pans out on the long shot fadeout of that panoramic key change at the end – is still too overcooked for my tastes, though the line “It’s only her love that keeps me wearing this dirt” would have been equally worthy of either Trent Reznor or Johnny Cash.

2. Mary Hopkin – Those Were The Days
I think you have to get to, or near, forty to understand this song and record fully, with its quatrain of youthful hopes, consolidation, frustration at dashed hopes and loss, and a quiet but encyclopaedic and welcoming second chance. Richard Hewson’s arrangement – different combinations of instruments for every verse and chorus – is exemplary and the use of the children’s choir throughout devastating. I’ve said enough about this record on CoM and elsewhere; suffice to say here that, in Popular terms, I would not hesitate in giving it a 10, for reasons which perhaps only those who truly understand me will understand.

1. Beatles – Hey Jude
Both of these records can stand as odes, or warnings, to the stranded generation as L. describes it in her Popular comment; both carry the unavoidable subtext, two years before Lennon announced it, that The Dream Is Over, and now we need to roll our sleeves up and attend to the unglamorous task of building a future. “The movement you need is on your shoulder” appears to be the song’s key line; it’s an invitation, not an incitement, to the next generation to “make it better.” Friendly persuasion.

I still have problems with McCartney’s overwrought wailing on the long fadeout, as I do with McCartney’s overwrought wailing in general, and also with the single’s foolish B-side. But I am moved by sanctity and honest faith in art, and there is nothing in “Hey Jude” which convinces me that the emotions McCartney expresses are anything other than sincere and heartfelt. I cannot undo the tremble I felt when watching the David Frost Show footage of the mass singalong at age four, where ordinary members of the public eventually obscure (Jude the Obscure!) the Beatles from sight altogether; a feeling which two decades of Live Aid and its successors have come nowhere near rekindling in me. “Hey Jude” was an event, and for me a far more powerful and realistic one than “All You Need Is Love.” Even in 1968 I knew I had just witnessed something very special, and listening to the song at five minutes to five yesterday afternoon on the radio, I could feel no real diminution of that awe.

Wasn't that one about "If you can see a green dog up a tree, well you know he's mine" ?

It was a staple of those variety shows back in 1968. Lulu, Cilla, Cliff, anything with a possibility that the Young Generation was on.

Along with something called "Jubilation T Cornpole" or something very like that.

Was it hell to be a female singer in the late '60s and early '70s and be condemned to All-Round Entertainment shows where they had to wear gingham flares, sing half-century-old showtunes, get painfully thrown around the stage by the Young Generation and participate in comedy sketches with Dick Emery and Freddie "Parrot Face" Davies?

"Abergavenny" - yes, that's the right one. Apparently it was a hit in America. Got played all the time on radio here but didn't chart.

Early in his career, "Leapy" met film actress Diana Dors, and her husband Alan Lake. One evening when Lake and Lee were drinking at a Sunningdale, Berkshire pub, a fight broke out, and during the fray, the pub owner was slashed across the wrist with a 'flick' knife. "Leapy" was arrested, charged, found guilty, and received a jail sentence. His career was seriously damaged, and Lee eventually wound up in Majorca, Spain, singing in bars.

20. Boystown Gang – Can’t Take My Eyes Off You
I mean, you would have thought Dale of all people would have been rushing to give this a spin – the real inspiration for the Pet Shop Boys’ cover, of course, and the Boystown Gang probably represented the last flourish from the original gay disco boom, before it mutated into hi-NRG and eventually House; so this is as bold and brassy as you’d expect. Will anyone have the nerve to play all fifteen or so minutes of “Cruisin’” on the radio ever again?

19. Mari Wilson – Just What I Always Wanted
Her first two singles, “Beat The Beat” and “Baby It’s True” were works of genius but not major hits (and were not even included on her first album, or any subsequent ones come to that), so she submitted to the bargain basement Fairlight treatment, with obligatory feeble “Poison Arrow”-type synth drumrolls and that horrible suffocating painted-on pseudo-electro sheen (and absolutely no bottom whatsoever) and got a top ten hit straightway. No wonder she subsequently switched to the Ronnie Scott’s/Pizza Express circuit.

18. Depeche Mode – Leave In Silence
Up from 23 the previous week, but presumably too Depressing and Doomy to play to an elderly Sunday afternoon audience. Posterity has never been kind to their second album, A Broken Frame, made after Vince Clarke had left, treating it as a transitional Martin-Gore-finding-his-songwriting-feet affair, and it is a rather doleful and introverted autumnal affair, but “See You” and “The Meaning Of Love” were both terrific singles and this one, though much more muted and less obvious, was an admirably miserabilist effort for an era where the gloss was looking increasingly more sickly.

17. Fat Larry’s Band – Zoom
Not their first UK hit single (“Center City” and “Act Like You Know” preceded “Zoom”) but it was their biggest; a nice old-school Philly-style ballad with queasy synths instead of strings. Not “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” but then few records are.

16. Talk Talk – Today
Not played, so that’s another royalty cheque Mark Hollis won’t be getting, not that he’d be particularly bothered; this was an early hit from their Play-Duran-Duran-In-A-Day era with hints of the deeper melancholy which was to follow, but hardly worth remembering in itself. I didn’t really think at the time from this evidence that they had a Spirit Of Eden or a Laughing Stock within them, but then would you have guessed The Drift from the evidence of “Love Her”?

15. Evelyn King – Love Come Down
Never much liked Kashif’s productions; if you wanted studium R&B in the early ‘80s you sent for Kashif. Bland and never anything more than vaguely agreeable; King recorded one of the greatest of all singles in “Shame” (full-length 12” version thereof) but I didn’t and still don’t feel this at all.

14. Dexy’s Midnight Runners with the Emerald Express – Come On Eileen
Going down, so it wasn’t played; I know we’ve all heard it a squillion times but it is a great record of redemption, sexual and spiritual, and coming right at the end of Too-Rye-Ay as it does (especially that excoriating, exorcising second side) its punch is, at the very least, doubled. Tom did it proud on FT so I’ll reserve further comment until he encounters it again on Popular.

13. The Kids From “Fame” featuring Valerie Landsburg – Hi-Fidelity
Played on the basis that it appeared on this week’s number one album, The Kids From Fame (which also knocked Lexicon Of Love off the top so I wasn’t exactly a fan). Fame was 1982’s Grease (at least in Britain) but it’s telling that, apart from the title song, none of its numbers has really endured. In the case of the godawful dirge “Starmaker” that’s probably a blessing, but “Hi-Fidelity” spells out the problem; a decent enough song in the pre-High School Musical mode, but hardly special. Which one was Valerie Landsburg again? And what was that really weird one sung by the guy who played Leroy which wasn’t a hit?

12. Carly Simon – Why?
Did anyone ever see the film Soup For One, and did it ever exist? Nevertheless this is one of Chic’s late masterpieces of gloom with Simon’s sardonic but not unsympathetic vocal and that pre-Boards Of Canada warped synth of punctum.

11. Shakin’ Stevens – Give Me Your Heart Tonight
Not played. Shaky was due to appear on that week’s TOTP but due to illness dropped out. The single never made the top ten, and his spot was reallocated to a new group who had just crept into the Top 40 at #38 called Culture Club.

10. Adam Ant – Friend Or Foe
Adam’s own “This Is Hardcore,” and definitely the sound of someone losing the plot. No one, least of all his own fans, knew quite what to make of it, and it was his first CBS single to miss the top five. On its second TOTP appearance the video was not shown (there had apparently been complaints, though I’ve no idea why), and we were instead “treated” to the “spectacle” of sundry Radio 1 DJs (and Jonathan King) “dancing” to it, complete with freeze-frame. Might work well for Robbie as a follow-up to “Rudebox.”

9. David Christie – Saddle Up
Unbelievably feeble French attempt at disco, though Dale assured us that it was “big in the clubs.” Not the ones I went to.

8. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five – The Message
Stands out in this chart like the sorest of thumbs, even now, and it’s one of the very few records which points the way to now (see also numbers 5 and 4 below), even if admiration at the time was blunted by all that Robert Elms/ripped Levis nonsense. What is most remarkable about “The Message” is what I would call its supra-realism; Melle Mel’s protagonist seems to act as a cipher for all the ills of the world. Like a cold rationalist “Subterranean Homesick Blues” it just keeps listing and piling up every conceivable hurt, pain, humiliation and annoyance on the narrator before suddenly sliding into a curiously disconnected requiem for a doomed life from cradle to premature grave, and then the street bust which is a virtually direct lift from “Living In The City.” I was never quite sure what the latter two parts had to do with the first section; but as a catalogue of urban poverty, both financial and mental, it still packs a considerable wallop. “Sometimes I think I’m going insane/That’s when I might hijack a plane!” Did someone say something about it could have been recorded last week?

7. Duran Duran – Save A Prayer
Simon Bates once read the lyric of this dirge on Radio 1 as though it were W H Bleeding Auden. Now Duran Duran are feted and revered as though they were David Sodding Sylvian. Where’s the justice, eh?

6. Shalamar – There It Is
Ah yes, the frankly OK-but-not-THAT-brilliant soul-pop act who suddenly became New Pop by proxy thanks to Jeffrey Daniel’s haircut and Covent Garden ‘phone booth routine. Strange how the cover to the Friends album was never altered or doctored, showing Daniel resplendent in his Phil Lynott perm and leather crotch. Meanwhile poor old Howard Hewett, who along with Jody Watley did all the donkey work of singing and co-writing, (a) had a terrible one-wash mullet perm, (b) sported an unfortunate moustache and (c) was called Howard Hewett so that disqualified him from coolness forever. “There It Is” is probably the best cut from the album, but really now you wonder why all the fuss existed; especially when you consider their 1983 sequel The Look, with Daniel looking like a stranded page boy and Hewett sporting a terrible one-wash mullet perm and an unfortunate moustache on the cover, which was electro hip-up-to-the-July-1982 minute and bombed, sans bass.

5. ABC – All Of My Heart
All through The Lexicon Of Love he has been singing in inverted commas with occasional flushes of rage (the last two couplets of “Valentine’s Day”); now he has to face reality, without quotation marks. More than one commentator at the time noted how the “real” Martin Fry suddenly comes through in those few moments on the record when he is utterly and entirely alone – as he is here, when he whispers, or mutters, the title; having avoided commitment, taking the easy way in of treating it all as a spectacle, he is suddenly left with nothing (having just been emotionally bankrupted in “Date Stamp”) except…himself, his own feelings, what he thinks and what he wants; he has no option left save to express everything directly, to muse upon the chances he really has missed. So spectacles are a waste (“Spare the hearts and flowers/Spare the ivory towers”).

Trevor Horn and Anne Dudley make the record breathe with Fry, above him, behind him, paving the ragged terrain he has to walk. “And I hope and I pray/That maybe someday/You’ll walk in the room with my heart.” Rejected by a postmodern world, he prays; the heart is still within him, beating, how can it not be?

Because without that heart he would not have the capacity to collapse; back home in Sheffield, broke, alone and broken, the façades having split open so easily and readily…

…and he succumbs. He crumbles. “All of my heart”…that final “heart” is hardly sung, has no attributable note.

As he turns to weep, to sob, to mourn for a lost reality, the orchestra cushions him, cradles him in its bosom in what is one of the most compassionate and breathtaking moments in all of pop. The camera, the listeners, take our leave as we pan out to widescreen, the orchestra as consoling madonna, and finally a few querulous guitar notes, and a roughly-tuned saxophone, like a busker in the street…the dream is over, or is it only to allow a new one to take shape?

4. Rockers Revenge featuring Donnie Calvin – Walking On Sunshine
Arthur Baker’s first big crossover hit as producer, “Planet Rock,” being a little too, er, strange for 1982 daytime radio (even though, in hindsight, it has turned out to be the most important and influential record of its year). But this retooling of the old Eddy Grant number certainly did the trick and brought some much needed electropunctum to the increasingly sterile airwaves, not to mention bringing Grant himself back to the charts (“I Don’t Wanna Dance,” “Electric Avenue”) as an indirect side-effect, and still sounds remarkably fresh; though as with “The Message,” you really need the full 12-inch effect.

3. Dire Straits – Private Investigations
Much was made of this single’s “epic” length (though “The Message” was longer – did anyone buy it on 7”? Was there even a 7” version released?), mainly by DLT, who proclaimed it the greatest single ever made, and even John Martyn on Radio Clyde’s record review show thought it something special. It came out as a 10” single as a trailer for Love Over Gold and it is truly terrible – an unwanted missing link between “If You Go Away” and John Cale’s “Gun” which sounds as though it’s awaiting a Martin Kemp ITV gritty crime drama to accompany.

2. The Jam – The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow)
Almost their last word, and it sounded it; clearly impatient for the group to finish, Weller is already writing “Style Council” songs; with its crass Crossroads guitar, syrupy strings and Jennie Belle Star backing vocals you tend to forget that it’s a Jam record.

1. Survivor – Eye Of The Tiger (Theme From Rocky III)
Survivor (or at least some of them) used to be Ides of March, who scored a big hit in ’71 with “Vehicle.” They were Burbank’s answer to Lighthouse, but nowhere near as good; I do still quite like “Vehicle” musically, but the lyric where the hairy singer entices young girls to enter his black sedan would not be gotten away with these days.

“Eye Of The Tiger” actually works quite well within its own designated remit; the rock is good and solid, the guitar punches are sufficiently onomatopoeic, and if Laibach haven’t yet covered it, they should do.

Still yer greatest record evah.

I hope they do 1984 at some point in December so I can wax equally lyrically about FGTH's "The Power Of Love."

Key moments: buying the 12"s of Planet Rock, The Message and Walking On Sunshine on the same day earlier in the summer, and realising that something new was up. Also discovering Lime & Bobby "O"/Flirts/Ronni Griffith, through spending large parts of the summer in northern and then southern France, where proto-Hi-NRG (and indeed David Christie's "Saddle Up", and Cheri's "Murphy's Law") was, indeed, Big In The Clubs.

And then, taking my first faltering steps onto the gay scene, and discovering that my local club (Part 2 in Nottingham) had one of the best reputations in the country, with an uber-upfront musical policy to match: proto-NRG and electro-funk nearly all the way, with a dose of more regular soul/funk on the side. The first club in town to use perfect beat-matching throughout the night, and as such a major influence on Graeme Park, who pioneered the early house boom at The Garage less than four years later.

All of which was fuelled by the extensive import section at Arcade Records, and soundtracked on the radio by none other than Dale Winton, then hosting a two-hour "soul show" (yeah, right) on Monday evenings on Radio Trent. ("This one's big in some of the specialist clubs in London" - yeah yeah, we know what you mean.)

So, yeah, the Boystown Gang single already felt a bit dated. A few of those campy string-driven late-late-disco singles were still coming out, but no-one cared for them much - not when there was Patrick Cowley to get stuck into. For my money, the "last flourish" properly belongs to Yvonne Elliman's glorious "Love Pains", and the Weather Girls "It's Raining Men" (which took another 18 months to chart, by which time we were all heartily sick of it).

I think you're being a bit harsh on "Love Come Down". Yes, I quite agree in general with your comments on the identikit Kashif sound (or the "shop-girl" sound, as James Hamilton in Record Mirror dubbed it), but this was the exception - glorious stuff, and right up there with Patrice Rushen's "Forget Me Not".

I'd also mount a partial defence of "Just What I Always Wanted". The previous two singles were, as you say, untouchable - but something about blending 1960s kitsch with Tony "New Musik" Mansfield's 1980s synth-kitsch worked for me, even if the formula ran out with the very next single, the woeful #51 smash "Beware Boyfriend".

Tony Mansfield - ah yes, I couldn't remember offhand who the producer was; for some reason I thought it was Pete Waterman under his "Peter Collins" guise.

Did his lawyers ever speak to Springsteen's team about Living By Numbers vis a vis Dancing In The Dark?

Good to have "Saddle Up" explained; I recall a weekly befuddled Peter Powell playing it on the Tuesday teatime Top 40 rundown with his "wtf?" response.

"Murphy's Law" was big at my regular club, the good old Ultratheque in Glasgow.

Cut to: "He said Cap-TAIN I said WOT?"

Um. Yes.

You know, some memories are best left untouched. :-)

The highlight was Hot Space by Queen for 25p so that gives you some idea.

Also Oxfam in Tooting is exactly the same size and generally has far better stock, but being south of the river presumably disqualified it.

20. Junior Walker & the All Stars – Walk In The Night
Predatory, hunched seduction; the grit of the alto, the Van Duren reed sucked down to its thinnest, set against the placid harpsichord, Ray Conniff abstract backing vocals and strings, but all the time closing in, blurring the harmonic transitions from middle-eight to main melody, Walker’s saxophone concordant but harsh. At any moment he could turn into either Sonny Stitt or Roscoe Mitchell; the miracle is watching him succeed in not turning.

19. Blackfoot Sue – Standing In The Road
A strange intro of hissing pistons and mono-note bass turning into a sinisterly low riff over which a Noddy Holder-esque vocal (albeit pitched about an octave and a half lower) ponders the infinities of stasis. “I’m such a lonely man/Don’t leave me alone/Standing in the road.” In subject matter and single-headed musical approach we could almost be listening to Gary Numan. That mid-song percussion break is crying out to be sampled, as is the hissing break (“Pushbike Song” on very bad acid). The false fade and re-entry are quite startling, the lead guitar nearly Coryell-hysterical. It peaked at number four. Where did they come from, and why did they go?

18. Peter Skellern – You’re A Lady
Jake Thackeray is getting his belated due – what a pity he couldn’t have got it when he was alive – but Skellern, not being a self-destructive alcoholic, awaits his. That’s as may be, and the comedy songs which form the majority of his output are a separate issue (though check out 1976’s unheralded masterpiece Hard Times). But few records bring back the grey 1972 of Changes, of road safety advertisements featuring hammer smashing into orange, of nightmares and of candid devotion, so easily as “You’re A Lady,” and few pop records have proved as resonant. It’s the end of the night, he’s nervous about telling her but eventually manages to articulate it – that “be mine” sounds like the hardest breath he’ll ever have to take.

“Hard to answer? Yes, I agree…but then I’ve got…to know.” And there behind him are the brass band and the community choir, the warmth which sustains him even as the chorus veers between celebration and apprehension. I find the record and performance almost unbearably moving, and know that if it had been recorded by Randy Newman or Tom Waits it would long since have been consecrated as a classic. But it reflects my frame of mind about proposals in general, it frames a time with uncanny accuracy and precision – thankfully, she said yes.

17. Judge Dread – Big Six
16. Dandy Livingstone – Suzanne, Beware Of The Devil
Pop-reggae times two, neither of them particularly engrossing. “Big Six” was unsurprisingly not spun, even though its sub-Benny Hill crassness is only offensive on aesthetic rather than moral grounds. Whereas “Suzanne” is reggae studium; it babbles along pleasantly enough, but Heart Of The Congos it is not.

15. Lynsey de Paul – Sugar Me
14. Gary Glitter – I Didn’t Know I Loved You (‘Til I Saw You Rock ‘N’ Roll)
13. Jackie Wilson – I Get The Sweetest Feeling
Hmm. Three different approaches to sex, none of them played by Dale; an especial pity in the case of “Sugar Me,” still one of the most extraordinary female pop hits ever, and one which helped induce my premature puberty a couple of years later (at eight it just sounded strange and beguiling). “I Get The Sweetest Feeling” was on the first of its three separate chart runs, and it’s still one of Van McCoy’s finest productions with a lead vocal from Jackie which just OOOOHHHHs stimulation.

The second hit single of Gary Glitter was not played.

12. Cliff Richard – Living In Harmony
Bang in the middle of his Festival of Light period, and even ghastlier than you might expect; a terrible scout camp acoustic singalong with a horn section of clarinet and kazoos, and even a “Congratulations”-style slow acclerando of the chorus at the end. Nothing to do with the legendary fourteenth episode of The Prisoner (the Vietnam critique disguised as Western pastiche).

11. Rod Stewart – You Wear It Well
Vapid rerun of “Maggie May,” and depressingly just as successful. He’s writing to her, they’re in different countries, she’s prospered and he hasn’t, or maybe vice versa, and it’s all a rather tiresome foray of nudge-nudge-faux-nostalgia which even Rod didn’t believe at the time. The violin obbligato is unhelpful.

10. Roxy Music – Virginia Plain
Next time you consider Mr Ferry in his M&S threads and Tory Party cabaret turns, or even the ineffable politesse of Mr Eno, consider the comic-book weirdness this represented to me as a child; daft but exact, dressed like Carry On aliens, Evan Parker-style overblowing on the oboe, Eno making fuck knows WHAT noises on FUCK knows what – well I sort of knew about Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra by then, but even so – and then rock and roll, is it 1962 or 1982 indeed Dr Puxley, sung in this UNATTRIBUTABLE voice (I only worked out it was Geordie a long time afterwards). Bowie’s Ziggy you could grasp in a Post-Urban Spaceman way; this was ungraspable but somehow it was mine, and even when it was reissued at the height of punk in October 1977 it still sounded so glamorously avant-garde as to be untouchable.

9. Drifters – Come On Over To My Place
From Bangs’ Clash trilogy: “…but your music scene in general was in such miserable shape that most of the hits on the radio were resurrected oldies.” A slight exaggeration, particularly since the Drifters’ chart success in the ‘60s was relatively modest in Britain (thanks to the sorry likes of Jimmy Justice and their domestic cover versions). There was a revival in place, and Cook and Greenaway were about to give the group the success in Britain they had always merited, albeit with far inferior material. In the meantime, this came back from ’66 (when it had only reached #40) and I can’t get excited about it. Its use in commercials came many, many years later.

8. Michael Jackson – Ain’t No Sunshine
The attendant irony of Jacko’s spoken preamble need not be underlined. The rockist guitar brings unnecessary sonic blotting to what should – and was in its Withered original – be a meditation of the quietest desperation, all of which turns on Withers’ “I know I know I know I know” loop – nearly the exact reverse of Van’s “the love that loves to love that loves to love” mantra. The song is drowned in the big screen production, but unsurprisingly Jacko had the UK hit and Withers didn’t.

7. Faron Young – It’s Four In The Morning
One of those drippy MoR country ballads which occasionally crossed over big time into the mainstream. Wasn’t Faron one of the very minor characters in Peanuts?

6. Sweet – Wig Wam Bam
Chinn and Chapman begin the toughening up of the group, at the group’s request. The lyric is still as silly as ever, but the record is best seen as a dry run for “Blockbuster.”

5. Donny Osmond – Too Young
The Osmonds definitely had their demographics sorted out; Little Jimmy for the toddlers, Marie for the country ballads, the group en masse for Serious Stuff, and Donny for the lovelorn teenage girls who made him the biggest by-product of the Osmonds factory, singing carefully-selected pre-Beatles ballads to an audience too young – as it were – to have heard them first time round. “Too Young” breaks no new ground, and isn’t nearly as compelling as the “Someone help me! HELP ME!” scream in the middle of “Puppy Love,” but I would assume Tom is counting his blessings that the charts didn’t start until November 1952, since evidence suggests that he would have had to deal with two versions of this song in 1951 – the Nat “King” Cole original and the British cover by, um, Jimmy Young.

4. Lieutenant Pigeon – Mouldy Old Dough
It’s always the glorious accidents, isn’t it? As I look through these lists of number ones I am instinctively drawn to those which sound as though they have been generated in the artist’s front room for minimal cost and maximal application, and possibly took slightly longer to record than they do to listen to – “Telstar,” “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” and “Your Woman” randomly spring to mind – and here we have an unrepeatable phenomenon; two Joe Meek fanatics, literally in the front room, utilising and manipulating just-out-of-date technology while one of their mothers joins in on the upright piano. With vocals they were Stavely Makepeace, and frequently got played on Radio 1 by Noel Edmonds; without vocals they were Lieutenant Pigeon, and they got lucky – “Mouldy Old Dough” was first released at the beginning of 1972 to minimal response, and was then used as the theme to a current affairs series in Belgium, where it immediately went to number one, so Decca decided to give the record a second chance in Britain (cf. “Baby Come Back”) and it took off seemingly from nowhere.

The pub piano of 59-year-old Hilda Woodward instinctively reminds us of Winifred Atwell, the already dated futurism of the record’s echoes and distortions of, inevitably, Meek, the growled title (the only lyric) a reminder of the rationalist present (and on at least one TOTP performance it came out as “Dirty old man,” with Rob Woodward clad as Napoleon), its suggestions of the future infinite. Glorious, pointless and so inherently British in its character and approach. One of the greatest.

3. Slade – Mama Weer All Crazee Now
Looking at the sleeves of the recently-reissued Slade back catalogue of albums, I’m struck by how unrepresentative they were of the group. Every schoolboy knew that they weren’t really hard men (I mean, Dave Hill for chrissakes!) but they were fun, and to quote the first part of that Bangs sentence cited above: “First time in 1972 was for Slade, who had the punters hooting…” They were lads, too, and “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” makes no pretence of its subject matter, to wit he and she sitting out the back by the stage door getting pissed. But dammit they ROCKED and it was fatal to take them seriously. Unlike most British rock acts of the period they also understood perfectly how the construct of the pop single as event worked, so all the stock ingredients of handclapping/foot-stomping/etc. are present and correct, but get progressively more intense with each new release, such that it provides almost a mechanical (nearly an electro) backing to the song. The jackhammer bravura of the “Mamamamamamamama” finale is nearly not human.

2. T. Rex – Children Of The Revolution
Certainly Slade sounded far more alive than Bolan did at this stage. “Children Of The Revolution” plods in a faintly pompous manner which suggests an attempt at “Hey Jude”-style Grand Gesture Pop, but such disconnected couplets as “I drive a Rolls-Royce/’Cos it’s good for my voice” serve to drive a wedge between the artist and his audience.

1. David Cassidy – How Can I Be Sure?
Is this the greatest teenpop record ever? The song as it stood was nearly perfect anyway, but Cassidy was the ideal choice to voice its existentialist uncertainty about love and life. You want to hug him, he sounds so lost, and yet that voice is so bold, so casually brilliant technically, that you end up admiring him. The genius stroke here is to omit the “I’ll be sure with you” happy ending present in both the Rascals’ original and Dusty’s cover and replace it with an unexpected major-minor turn around when Cassidy sings his last “constantly changing” and spins amid the French Bacharach spirals of the song, no more decided than he had been at the song’s quiet commencement. Forefather to both Japan’s “Ghosts” and Tricky’s “Aftermath” but you knew that already.

No, sorry. The northern vocal and the 'innocent' vibe given off really rankled with me at the time, as it does now. Sorry.

Slade sang "My My we're all crazy now" but Chas Chandler misheard the title, and all agreed it was better.

"Dirty old man" was the name of a LPidgeon album track.

All you wanted to know about Blackfoot Sue : http://www.blackfootsue.com/bfsbiog.htm
Apparently they became 'Liner' a soul band on Atlantic Recds produced by Arif Mardin! Then they became soft-metallers 'Outside Edge' - now I remember them vaguely.

Following the biog down to the end we see them in 2005 doing a gig in The Red Lion in Twickenham (a right hole) only 200 yards from my house!

Funny how T-Rex peaked earlier than you think. I guess their best year was 71 really.

I found those Drifters reissues kind of depressing and pointless.

There has to be a collection of LP B-sides! Someone must do this.

iirc, one of their other b-sides was called "Opus 302".

Blackfoot Sue had very, very, very long hair. Waist-length, the lot of them, as I recall.

Bryan Ferry doing "Virginia Plain" on TOTP actually scared me a little - although not as much as his Man At M&S ads, admittedly.

The last time I listened to Michael Jackson's on "Ain't No Sunshine", I remember deciding it was his best vocal performance ever.

"Mama Weer All Crazee Now" was never one of my favourite Slade singles. A bit too lumpen / bloated / by rote. (And oh, what a delight to own Old New Borrowed And Blue all over again. "Miles Out To Sea", marvellous!)

Always liked that pop-reggae sound, within reason at any rate, so "Suzanne Beware Of The Devil" does it for me - although the follow up "Think About That" is even better.

It's a heretical view, and probably age-related, but I always preferred silly 1972-73 verging-on-self-parody T.Rex.

"Desperate Dan" was the only other British hit, but their '74 rendition of "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen" was a massive hit in Europe and Australia.

20. Dave Edmunds – Queen Of Hearts
Not that you’d have known it from dear old Dave and his trusty old pub rock, sounding here for all the world like a Shakin’ Stevens demo. And to think that he began the seventies as a (then) unparallelled retrofuturist (“I Hear You Knockin’”). Does that ending ever end?

19. Bill Lovelady – Reggae For It Now
18. Crusaders – Street Life
Neither was played and in the case of “Reggae For It Now” – performed by a white chap who subsequently formed an MoR supergroup with Mary Hopkin, Peter Skellern and Julian Lloyd Webber named, er, Oasis – I’m rather glad in view of uncomfortable associated school disco memories. My dad reckoned “Street Life” would have been great if Randy Crawford had shut up.

17. Cliff Richard – We Don’t Talk Anymore
It’s his masterpiece…well, it’s between this and “Miss You Nights.” From laughing stock Festival of Light buffoon to suddenly becoming hip again…effortlessly futuristic pop this, with his agonised, don’t-believe-it-for-a-second vocal (“I ain’t losin’ sleep!”) and the genius touch of escalating tension as the song climbs forever upwards (so disturbed that multitracked Cliffs mock “shee-ee-ee-ep” back at him, as though laughing) in gradated disbelief. Then, just as it’s all about to boil over, Alan Tarney switches off his synth for half a second of dying swan, like a ruthless tot’s thumb sentencing the ant to a further gruelling ascent of the hill, to bring Cliff back where he started. Any meaningful talk about the perfect pop song and the perfect pop single has to stem from this.

16. Madness – The Prince
Yes, I was severely irked by Suggs and his mates playing for the benefit of the Tory Party treasurer recently – is there anyone, in the end, who can’t be bought? – so best to remember them when they were young and broke and eager and wanting us all to lose ourselves in respectful memory of Prince Buster (but why memory? He’s still going!). It is completely impossible for me to be objective about 2-Tone in ‘79-’80, in label reality or in movement/outlook, so yes we loved this, and one of the photo booth pictures on the inner sleeve of the One Step Beyond album is of Laura…

15. Secret Affair – Time For Action
…and yes, Mod was the revival, Mod was our thinking, Mod brought us together and you may scoff but Ian Page and his suit and trumpet and Glory Boys…well, we believed him (if only temporarily) and yes it was an anthem for us and it still makes me shiver and cry now, and no Dale didn’t play it…

14. Frantique – Strut Your Funky Stuff
…nor this…

13. Commodores – Sail On
12. Nick Lowe – Cruel To Be Kind
…nor these either. Time for a two-hour slot?
(Summaries: modestly alluring formula disco, Richie attempting to write Motown’s first country hit, Nick is good old Nick and no one’s got a bad word to say against him least of all me so there you go)

11. Kate Bush – On Stage (E.P.)
A snapshot of her only tour, which I saw at the Glasgow Apollo (Dale played “Them Heavy People”) and I wish she’d do another one, preferably in tandem with Sylvie Guillem.

10. Electric Light Orchestra – Don’t Bring Me Down
As heard at Club Poptimism on Thursday; their first hit without a string section, bulb lights in Jeff’s mind, “Hey Bev we can save some money loike,” cue suddenly redundant string section exiting stage left. Who the hell was “BRRRRRRRUCE?”

9. Dollar – Love’s Got A Hold On Me
That clunky Prestige Cookers synth riff mars it somewhat, but Thereze’s lead vocal is as gorgeous as ever; you can hear them limbering up for the mastery of the Horn tetralogy (which latter, please note, is now finally available on CD – The Platinum Collection, on Warners, a fiver from HMV, what are you doing still sitting here, it’s the finest tetralogy of pop singles EVER).

8. Rainbow – Since You’ve Been Gone
Fluff would have heralded this with his Hallelujah Chorus jingle. Russ Ballard writing, Graham Bonnet’s voice unchanged and undiminished from his Marbles days, the most popist record involving Blackmore since the Meek years – look, if you have to have AoR metal pop, then it’s this and then it’s “Photograph” by Def Leppard and that’s rather a happy life.

7. Michael Jackson – Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough
The beginning of time. Is side one of Off The Wall God?

6. Buggles – Video Killed The Radio Star
Well? Would you have known from this evidence? Or do we look upon it more kindly with the benefit of hindsight as to what Horn went on to achieve – as opposed to 1979, when it was largely regarded as a very unhip variant on M’s “Pop Muzik”?

But it’s all there already, isn’t it – the matchless perspective shifts in the vocals, from Trevor’s Temperance Seven megaphone delivery (“back in fifty-TWO”) to the female “oh, ah uh-uh-ohh”s suddenly veering into view, the crashing poison arrows of drums in the instrumental break (let’s turn a deaf ear to Geoff Downes inventing Asia two second later), the deployment of silence and space, and that piano…all the while the song purports to mourn the passing of an era but in truth is palpably eager about the future, can’t wait to get there in fact…and then you catch that little tinkle of piano right at the end of the fadeout, and you think of that coda Anne Dudley adds to the album version of “Beat Box” or on the Radio 1 session version of same where she effortlessly segues back into “Video Killed The Radio Star”…

So, yes…the beginning of time, part 2.

5. Bellamy Brothers – If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body, Would You Hold It Against Me?
A title with a dull C&W pop tune attached. As a whole, it’s not one of the great ’79 charts, is it? Perfect for Sunday afternoon Radio 2 though it may be. Ah, yes, um…

4. Status Quo – Whatever You Want
Dig that slow out-of-tempo intro! Were The Quo going avant-garde already? Hang on, they’re still using Matchstick Men phasing! And that little steal from “Black Night” in the middle eight! Bless them, bless them, bless them (and I mean that most sincerely friends)!

3. Gary Numan – Cars
“Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” was probably unrepeatable – a number one fit to stand beside “Johnny Remember Me” and “Telstar” – but this comes awfully near, and its surface sleekness is even more disturbing. Note how the vocal ends with more than half the song still to go; he is trapped in the machine, he becomes the machine, he is away, invisible, those carbon monoxide clouds of Moog arising to represent his otherwise inaudible cries of dying. Or maybe he simply drove off and left the rest of us behind to cope.

2. Blondie – Dreaming
A partial return to excitable Plastic Letters power pop, Clem Burke immediately and audibly liberated by the song’s speed to put in all the fills and rolls Chapman banished from “Heart Of Glass.”

1. Police – Message In A Bottle
Interesting how Sting’s gotten on the John Dowland kick of late, given the “sea-o” and “me-o”s of this record. And as silly as he evidently was even in 1979, the Police as a singles band were one of the greatest we ever had, and conclusive evidence of the tenet that there are some acts who only make sense when they have number ones and are on the cover of Smash Hits. The video was glorious – and yes, Sting glowering over that trolley stimulated me, I felt the sex – Stewart Copeland’s triplet drumming miraculous and the record fantastic; their chops were evident, and we all knew they’d been around, but they brought the same askew perspective to pop as Cream did (another band who made total sense if you think of them purely in terms of their run of singles); the anguish in the verse, the expectations of the bridge and the gentle letdown to the unresolved major/minor seesaw of the chorus. Even though Sting can’t resist inserting that “Sending out an Esso Blue” right at the end.

I have not one idea how this one went. I can guess how it probably went, but...

Ol' Jamelia, doing her new single, in front of a giant fuck-on TopOfThePops neon, "October 2006" dated on caption...

It's returning via stealth, isn't it?

I thought about it but I'm not always in on Saturday evenings (e.g. I was at T's housewarming on Sat so missed it entirely, though did catch the first episode of Robin Hood which is obv the greatest TV show ever at the moment). Even if they posted track listings I would clearly need to watch the programme (curiously here's a situation where it would have been handier, for me at least, if they'd kept it on Sundays).

Re. Frantique: "Get up, stand up, strut your funky stuff, sho' nuff."

I enjoyed that Dollar track on the way back from the supermarket, first time I'd heard it. Quite liked the popcorn synth add-ons though.

But Frantique hasn't worn so well. It's too fast! It's Philly goes Wally!

go on then...

Good chart this. My favourites :

We Don't Talk Anymore
The Prince - the day after we saw this on TOTP me and my friends all did Chas Smash's special dance at the Friday lunchtime school disco. Dollar
Rainbow - I love the way that Richie's baroque noodling in the middle gives way to brutal chopped powerchords and Bonnet's grunted 'Uh' to take it back to the chorus. More AOR pop-metal please.
All of the top 3 obv. OTM about Clem's drumming, it's back to the unfettered rolling around the kit style of the early days, except with more power.
Buggles - what Marcello said - a piece of pop genius from the Hornster.

20. Bill Lovelady – Reggae For It Now
19. Commodores – Sail On
18. Dollar – Love’s Got A Hold On Me
17. Bellamy Brothers – If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body, Would You Hold It Against Me?
16. Frantique – Strut Your Funky Stuff

15. Status Quo – Whatever You Want
Would have been higher, but for that Argos advert. "Living On An Island" was the one for me, though: homo-eroto-Quo!

14. Police – Message In A Bottle
All the A-list beautiful people at school were into The Police, so I turned against them pretty sharpish. Also wrecked by all the subsequent live solo acoustic versions, e.g. Clapham Common 1986.

13. Kate Bush – On Stage (E.P.)
12. Dave Edmunds – Queen Of Hearts

11. Secret Affair – Time For Action
Ian Page ended up working for the Daily Telegraph, didn't he? "Let Your Heart Dance" waa a disappointing follow-up, but "My World" was divine.

10. Gary Numan – Cars
As covered by The Damned on a John Peel session of the time: "In a gay bar..."

9. Rainbow – Since You’ve Been Gone
I also liked the Cherie & Marie Currie version (her out of The Runaways).

8. Cliff Richard – We Don’t Talk Anymore
7. Electric Light Orchestra – Don’t Bring Me Down

6. Madness – The Prince
It was total 2-Tone label fetishism round our way. Every release felt like a major event (at least until we got to The Bodysnatchers and the Swinging Cats).

5. Nick Lowe – Cruel To Be Kind
Intensely nostalgic - so much so that I've resisted purchasing it or downloading it, just to keep its memory sacrosanct.

4. Crusaders – Street Life
Immaculate in every respect, including the presence of Ms Crawford.

3. Buggles – Video Killed The Radio Star
First verse mis-translated on Japanese import as "I heard you won the Wallace back in '52..."

2. Michael Jackson – Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough
The first record I danced to at a proper disco, if the Cambridge YMCA counts as a proper disco.

1. Blondie – Dreaming
Defies all analysis, which is just as it should be.

I have a tape where John Peel says "Did someone say "Arsenal" at the end there?"

I'm sure he didn't actually mean Arsenal...

And what a week to tune in! That 1979 top 10 is solid gold from top to tail. And several classics in 20-11 too. I don't think I'll tune in again. It could only be downhill fro here. ;)

1979, which I currently feel just about outranks 1982 as The Greatest Year For Pop Ever
No argument from me there.

Still this chart trumps almost everything Marcello's listed so far on this thread.

EC's released version of GT way after DE's, and quite different.

EC's demo of GT is very similar to Dave Edmunds'.

Rockpile - yes, there was some legal issue that stopped them releasing recds under their own name IIRC. So yes, NL and DE recds were essentially Rockpile releases. Billy Bremner on guitar, but who the heck was the drummer?

I must dig out the EC versions. As I recall they both had double-time drums compared with DE's version, giving them a less flowing feel.

I did listen to "Freak Zone" though, and it was good.

I wonder whether I should start analysing POTP if Marcello isn't? I've been enjoying doing the same with the Capital Gold equivalent: maybe I should do both, if I can somehow find the time?

http://cookham.blogspot.com/

http://cookham.blogspot.com/

5. Hedgehoppers Anonymous - It's Good News Week

They were the band at the airbase when my Dad was in the RAF in Germany, when this was a hit. There was massive controversy about the 'anti-bomb' lyrics at the time, and they were not allowed to play their hit in the naafi club, evenings. They also tried to buy themselves out but were refused.

Having recently suffered David & Jonathan's "She's Leaving Home", Billy Preston's "Get Back" (from the Sgt Pepper movie) and Celine Dion's "Here There And Everywhere", all on the same George Martin compilation album, I've been beginning to wonder the same thing...

I actually remember being amazed when I discovered that the Beatles' version hadn't been an original UK single - it just seemed too ingrained, too fundamental.

http://cookham.blogspot.com/

Whoa!

The first two Durutti tracks were on "A Factory Sample", one prod by Laurie Latham, the other Martin Hannet. Most of the band wanted to continue with Laurie, Vini and Tony Wilson wanted Martin. So the band sodded off and became the Mothmen, Vini recorded the album w/Martin but got so bored with the lack of enthusiasm from Hannet fannying around with some newly arrived equipment, he went home 3/4 way through. A fine album resulted, but side two is one of the shortest ever.

How much is that original Factory Sample package worth now (I paid 59p for it out of Bloggs in St Vincent Street)?

Popsike is great for storing old ebay auctions' selling prices, with a not great search button.

xpost yeah, the Stickers is probably a factor(y) too. There are 2 'completed' auctions that sold for £25 or thereabouts, one I checked is definitely not a bootleg, so figure.

Oh, and "A factory Sample Too" on Factory2 records, yours for £0.99

The following week the single dropped from 10 to 13 and under TOTP chart rules they couldn't show it. Cue red faces all round.

Then they made the rules less stringently applied, so as to allow Mick Jagger's "Let's Work" on, which was at number 41 at the time. But it was rubbish and it went down that week.

Ant was basically a solo artist then.

I also recall the hapless Simon Park Orchestra being crammed onto a single stage in their 70-plus entirety during "Eye Level"'s run at the top.

I must admit the point about the "pointlessly bouncing Linn drums" in the track struck a chord.

Among the new releases, Rundgren's "Hello It's Me," which in pop terms is actually better than it gets, but despite going top five in the States sold not a bean here, largely because it didn't get much airplay. Can somebody coordinate a download campaign to get this into the charts?

Meanwhile the Top 20 looked like this:
20. Diana Ross - All Of My Life
A song which both my dad and I were convinced at the time was a total ripoff of the then-current Sunsilk advert theme. Another example of the cheesy gown-swooping balladry in which La Ross got bogged down throughout her All Round Entertainer seventies phase before Chic temporarily bailed her out.

19. Roxy Music - Street Life
Alien and frightening to my nine-year-old ears (I thought at the time he was singing "my telly post bombs") with equal quantities of whitened noise and beauteous sway. Those warping synths a decade before "Keep Feeling Fascination" and a generation before Boards of Canada. I think it's my favourite Roxy single. And the forthcoming Ferry-does-Dylan album is better than you think.

18. Gilbert O'Sullivan - Why Oh Why Oh Why
Lugubrious, slightly self-pitying relationship problem ballad, not played.

17. Mott The Hoople - Roll Away The Stone
Though it only peaked at number eight it actually outsold "All The Young Dudes" and I agree at the moment that it's not only Mott's best single, but also THE GREATEST SINGLE EVER MADE AS OF TODAY (not sure about "Dr Love" though). "Gonna bring your records?" "Oh! Will do!" (Thunderthighs! Helen Terry a decade before Culture Club!). Cue Eno-esque avant-synth squiggles! FANTASTIC! And go petition whoever owns the rights now for re-publication of Diary Of A Rock And Roll Star. Yes it's of its time and totally non-PC, but its words live and breathe with vicious vibrancy.

16. Wizzard - I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday
Not played, since Roy Wood crops up again later on in the list.

15. David Essex - Lamplight
Not played, which is a shame. Stoned Dixieland/music hall glam arguably weirder than "Rock On."

14. Andy Williams - Solitaire
A decade before the codified, spotless isolationism of "Careless Whisper" we get Andy Williams' voice echoing into itself with that police siren keyboard motif which turns up in a huge proportion of deathbound songs from "I Am The Walrus" to "Waiting For The Miracle," singing about himself in the first person - his voice crumbles on the "died" of "and slowly died," as well as each "by myself" in the chorus - and all around him he realises his true incapacity to dance again. Perhaps the most sadly cutting words are "So much to say that goes unspoken." The dust on his porthole of a window, the bereft man unable to face the world from any angle, suffocating in the gases of his own self-imposed silence. Karen Carpenter both added and subtracted a verse and brought her own kind of regret-filled hope to the song, but with Williams you are eerily aware that there is no way out.

13. Gary Glitter - I Love You Love Me Love
Not played.

12. Robert Knight - Love On A Mountain Top
Also not played; despite being a Northern Soul staple, it was mainly popularised at the Coventry Mecca by its resident DJ Pete Waterman.

11. Faces - Pool Hall Richard/I Wish It Would Rain
The former got played, as it always does. If one must have pub rock then let it be as lovely and shambolic (superficially, though underneath tight as hell) as this.

10. Mud - Tiger Feet
The first of TWO new entries in this week's top ten, which at the time was unheard of, though this was the one which ended up as 1974's biggest seller; Elvis in Butlins, DLT doing the roadie line dance on TOTP, that strident Ants-anticipating drumbeat, and it's none the worse for any of it - its shameless pantomime glam is much missed in this unforgiving world of Mikas.

9. Roy Wood - Forever
A strangely schizophrenic single wherein Wood alternates between doing a Beach Boys pastiche (with a very good impersonation of Carl Wilson on lead vocals) and singing the song as "himself." Fine and ingenious - he was and is the British Todd - but I'd have preferred him to do the whole thing Holland-style.

8. Marie Osmond - Paper Roses
Only one Osmonds single in the Top 20? And also the only UK solo hit for hapless Marie, whose cottonbud country-pop covers never really attracted British ears, apart from this one, which, as Dale pointed out, was originally a UK hit in 1960 for the Kaye Sisters ("Ah! A completely different era!" he sighed).

7. Golden Earring - Radar Love
Holland's Kings Of Rock, with the somersaulting drummer subsequently responsible for Stars On 45. Good, punchy and vaguely ominous pop-rock (with this and "Hello It's Me" I seriously think it's time to bring back horn sections) - but what really struck me after three decades was the couplet "When I get lonely and I'm sure I've had enough/She sends her comfort coming in from above." All this before the internet - but in this cold and semi-bleak midwinter it is so, so true and she knows it...

6. Sweet - Teenage Rampage
The highest new entry, though the less threatening "Tiger Feet" beat it to the top. Both Chinnichap productions, so I'm sure they didn't lose any sleep, but "Rampage," despite being a partially unashamed "Blockbuster" rewrite with found audience sounds ("WE! WANT! SWEET!") might be the most chilling of Sweet hits with its bloodcurdling calls for "revolution" and "burning." OK, so it's still basically pantomime call-and-response stuff, but there's something else burning here, something far more disturbing in the unruly clangs of guitar and drums on which the young Steve Jones and Paul Cook would pick up immediately. Brian Connolly's final repeated screams of "NOW! NOW! NOW!" somehow manage to anticipate both Freddie Mercury and Johnny Rotten - but the latter far more so than the former.

5. Alvin Stardust - My Coo-Ca-Choo
"Who is EL-vin Stardust?" asked the early Radio Luxembourg ads for "My Coo-Ca-Choo," but that idea was quickly modified (Elvis + Gene Vincent - see what Magnet writer/producer Peter "Not The Buzzcock" Shelley and Magnet PR man Pete Waterman did there?). He turned out to be pre-Beatles Britpop supporting player Shane Fenton with a fresh lick of paint (or green gel for his glued-on sideboards) and the song is a minimal rewrite of "Spirit In The Sky," but its ITV sitcom glam is still quite endearing - "back to my flat" and "groove on me mat" sound like outtakes from the average Man About The House script.

4. Cozy Powell - Dance With The Devil
Again there is something of the sixties about this psyched-out Sandy Nelson update, and not just the "Third Stone From The Sun" melody ripoff; it properly belongs in a late 1968 chart with the likes of "Race With The Devil" and "Sabre Dance." My favourite of his "solo" hits is the undervalued "Na Na Na," a top ten hit that summer credited to Cozy Powell's Hammer and featuring vocals by Frank Aiello (Danny's brother?).

3. Slade - Merry Xmas Everybody
I've never quite understood why Christmas singles sell at all after Christmas itself is done. Don't people literally stop buying them? But there we have Wizzard still snowing at number sixteen, and here's Slade, in mid-January, only just coming off the number one slot. Admittedly it did drop pretty steeply after that, but the prolonged post-Epiphany success of this song, in its deliberate context as provider of cheer and comfort to a working-class Britain systematically falling apart - power cuts, miners' strikes, energy crises, three-day weeks, the imminent General Election, "Who runs this country?" etc. - suggests a deeper need, and a true post-seasonal cultural crossover.

2. Leo Sayer - The Show Must Go On
Oh, the IRONY! "Baby, there's an enormous crowd of people and they're all after my blood!" "I wish that they'd just tear down the walls of this the-A-tre and let me out, let me out!"

In the meantime, poor ignorant Jade throws her future away, but with dear old Alan Clark RIP and Repton-educated Jeremy Clarkson, oh that's just the way he is, have you no sense of HUMOUR? That is the real issue which the "debate" should address.

1. New Seekers - You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me
Something of an anti-climax (and also something of a slow sales week) to find these cheery cardigans at number one. Last week (15 January 1977, which I found too dull to write about) also had a Tony Macaulay song at number one ("Don't Give Up On Us" by Dishy David Soul). My mum likes this one, though.

Lynsey DePaul on the album version (otherwise identical take)

5. Alvin Stardust - My Coo-Ca-Choo
Does anybody else remember his first TV appearance on Ayshea's "Lift Off" where he war an afro and was painted one half ginger, one half black (left/right split) ?

2. Leo Sayer - The Show Must Go On
Oh, the IRONY! "Baby, there's an enormous crowd of people and they're all after my blood!" "I wish that they'd just tear down the walls of this the-A-tre and let me out, let me out!"

He would adapt this to whatever place he was singing this. e.g. Seaside Special version :: "I wish that they'd just tear down the walls of this ..... TENT! and let me out, let me out!"

But he did "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" on Seaside Special backed by the obligatory cheesy dance troupe! Catch the Scissor Sisters doing that, eh?

Street Life, Roll Away The Stone and Lamplight stuck around more or less next to each other in the charts for several weeks as I recall - I always link them together for that reason.

Memories of a "Who IS this Hot new Talent?" Leo Sayer BBC2 In Concert special from the same period, performed entirely in his Pierrot costume. The Mika of early 74?

Robert Knight's version of Love On A Mountain Top fully eclipsed in my memory by Peter "Crackerjack" Glaze's interpretation...

Another Lynsey de Paul-related changing guest vocalist scenario - on "Won't Somebody Dance With Me?" Ed Stewart does the "May I have the pleasure of this dance?" line on the version played on radio, but on the single it's Barry Blue.

Ah, good ol' needletime restrictions...

I would say "That's NOT THE RECORD" and everyone else would say "Yes it is, don't be silly, pssh"

Didn't think this week's chart was interesting enough to write about at length (since most of the interesting stuff in it I've written about before) other than the curiosity of "My Boy" and "The Bump" being written by the same composers.

I prefer the Sinead O'Connor version of Streets of London. She sounds more sincerely unhappy and less finger-wagging.

b) the implausible drummer on the record is David Essex.

and this coming Sunday is w/e 5th February 1983, apparently - not a particularly interesting period and certainly not an encouraging one, as I found out myself recently

today, it's 1983. Synchronicity.

the human league song from vice city. ace.

this is pretty much the same as the chart at the top of the page. candy girl is great! is this teenpop?

true is no 1. not good.

Full circle.

What's the likelihood that they'll do 1971 next week?

Ah well, that's that then. Don't really need to bother with it again until/unless Robin and I start compiling and presenting it when it goes to Resonance... *inyourdreamsMC.jpg*

They still haven't done a 1981 or 1984 chart since Marcello started his commentaries. Perhaps you could complete the set if they ever do so.

It's funny how I've started to miss the very early sixties ones now that they've gone. They had a real unfamiliar and musty quality, slightly melancholy, like spending a Sunday afternoon rooting around your grandparents attic when you're a child.

they do them occasionally. it's annoying the show is stuck in 1 '67 - '78 rut most of the time, gets a bit wearing.

I would definitely like the programme to come out of its demographic comfort zone and tackle both the nineties and the fifties - the original Jimmy Savile Double Top Ten Show regularly did fifties charts and they were strange but reassuring things.

i'd like to hear a chart from '93 with animal nitrate and i love your smile in it. if that's possible.

Unfortunately I Love Your Smile was a hit in '92.

'93 is always written off as a duff year for pop - calm before the Britpop storm, nothing going on except Suede etc. - but actually it was a terrific year for the charts, especially all the crossover dancehall stuff. R2 listeners need to be reminded of that.

i remember the charts of 1993 as being freddie mecury, 4 non blondes and lots and lots of reggae. what was that song that went "a la la long, a la la long lonely nights"? i loved that age 9.

"I've been watching you"

Wasn't that Freddie Mercury and "Living On My Own"?

(no)

Ah that was ne about "looking at your big brown eye"

Try the thread about "songs pertaining to 4n4l s3x"

(that was an xpost)

That one sounds like "Shine" by Aswad which was '94.

Correction!

It was "Sweat" by Inner Circle!

"And if you cry out, I'm gonna push it some more more more..."

"Sweat (a la la la la long)" by Inner Circle.

http://www.lyricsdepot.com/inner-circle/sweat-a-la-long.html

"and if you cry out, I'm gonna push it in some more"

Nice chap.

xpost obviously, making me FIRST!!

It wasn't worth it.

The thing that puts me off "Temptation" more than anything these days is Glenn Gregory's leery "oh" after "carved by another's hand."

Makes him sound like a dirty old man, but then again "Come Live With Me."

Remove the quotes and the sentence runs on ".. and see what a DOM sounds like!"

I thought Glenn Gregory was very good in Emmerdale last night, as Bob Hope's ghost dad.

As regards "Sweat Open Brackets La La La La Long Close Brackets How Many Points Uncle Ted," I'd moderately like to see John Otway doing a cover version.

"Sweat" could be greatly improved by running the vocals from Bucks Fizz "Land Of Make Believe" over the backing track.

Why always the same boring charts?

How many times have they done March 1967 and March 1978 now? Nine? Ten?

If I were running POTP, my first programme would feature 1953 and 2008.

Then I'd split the programme in two.

Sundays at current time for 50s, 60s and 70s and Dale to remain presenter.

Saturday afternoons from 1-3 pm for 80s, 90s and 00s and get someone more attuned to those times than Dale. It would inherit Jonathan Ross' audience and R2 could get rid of those dismal comedy shows that no one listens to.

And only feature ONE chart in each programme and play the Top 20 in FULL.

If Capital Gold can do it so can Radio 2.

Blackburn took over the show on Saturday; immediate improvement – better choices of records, closer engagement with the music, Dalebot not missed (you just KNOW he would have played the Dooleys over “Tusk”), stats overload cut down and put in their place. Clever pick of years as well; had totally missed the links between “Winchester Cathedral” and “Video Killed The Radio Star.” Looking forward to listening again.

Marc, do you still .."

For my sins I bought all of them, as I have done with every Top 40 single since 1974 -

Sadly (or, in the case of storage, happily?) I am now beholden to Brer iTunes. For physicals I wait for the albums and/or Now Volume X etc.

Big gaffe this week: November ’81 – “It’s Raining” by Darts (from ’78!) was played instead of “It’s Raining” by Shakin’ Stevens. Actually it didn’t bother me that much; even Shaky would admit that his “It’s Raining” is not amongst his masterpieces and there was a nice, gloomy OMD feel to the record which fit in very well with the awesome stuff elsewhere in this magnificent chart. Such a treat to hear New Pop in its original chart context and the show did its job of taking me back to both time and place.

The Nov ’68 chart was pretty great, too; the main difference between the two years being that British pop in late ’68 seemed to have lost its way (“Listen To Me” was the last Hollies single with Nash on board and sounds like a washing powder commercial as well as sounding oddly like Oasis; “Eloise” demonstrated, as it always superbly does, that nobody else was even trying) whereas late ’81 Brit (New) Pop knew exactly where it was going.

The other curious recurring theme in the ’68 chart; pinings for lovers who don’t exist (“Only One Woman,” “Jesamine,” “Eloise”).

Mmm, I don't so much mind "It's Raining" Shakey, rather that than the usual easycoverversionlite.

Enjoyed the POTP documentary on Radio 2 last night. Really it was an appreciation of Fluff but terrific listening for chart geeks such as myself.

I note that Dale’s decade at the helm hardly got a look in and Mr Cash My Gold was not prevailed upon to reminisce. Perhaps (and understandably) the BBC would prefer to forget about that lamentable time.

Always good to hear “Party Fears Two” and hyuk they still have to refer to “a single by Max Romeo.”

i agree that having Tony do the show has raised the bar quite considerably, and whenever i get the chance to listen, i enjoy his picks and snippets of detail.
just a shame my wife cant cope with his over emphasised vocal styling that has got more pronounced in recent years (or so it seems .. )

aw, i used to love dale's pick of the pops. not so keen on blackburn though.

Nice end to last Saturday's POTP with a re-broadcast of Fluff doing the countdown to the #1. It helped that it related to IMHO song-for-song the greatest Top 20 chart of all time (September '72 in case you missed it).

That does look like a very good chart, although I'm sticking with June 1979 as my greatest ever. I think Marcello favours March 1982 (and justifiably so). We should do a poll!

March '82 was great was May was better!

http://www.chartstats.com/chart.php?date=29%2F05%2F1982

1978 on Saturday. Because it was all about Leo Sayer and Crystal Gayle. "Public Image," "Ever Fallen In Love" and "Hurry Up Harry" all climbing the top 20 and all missed out. Some of me finds this reassuring - after three-and-a-half decades, the BBC still can't get to grips with punk - while the licence-paying part of me does his usual sigh at public money being used to promote Stalinist (or should that be Thatcherite?) rewriting of history. People who tweet about what a great show it is when driving the kids home are The Enemy, just as they or their parents were then.

Well, I know which bunch of songs My Kids would rather hear.

Blackburn always claimed to like Buzzcocks at the time, as well. They were the one exception to his I-hate-punk stance.

I much prefer Kid Jensen's Double Top 20 show on Smooth FM, Sundays 6-8 pm. Because it's Smooth FM they tend to bypass or minimise anything approaching "rock" but it's a far better listen and I find that stance a lot easier to deal with than BBC's Mumsnet Knows Best approach.

But in a way, I can accept Blackburn's continued sidelining of PiL and Sham - he hated them then, he hates them now, there's a consistency - and his picks do tend to be better than Dale's. I don't think it's so much of a case of R2 smoothing out the rough edges - Buzzcocks are totally R2 Core Values these days! - as Blackburn making his own choices, which I think is more or less fine.

Thing is, you ask Swern how he puts these shows together and he’ll tell you it’s a case of sticking in a drawing pin and seeing which chart it lands on, which is patently untrue; the same patterns of featured charts recur year after year. If it’s Blackburn’s curmudgeon-ness then that’s one thing, but it remains deliberate misrepresentation of history and using public money to do it. All that talk when TB took over about how he’d like to feature more recent charts; whatever happened to that? If he wants to bang his own drum then he can bugger off to Smooth or Heart or whatever and do it there, but in the wider scheme of things it’s all about this stupid blanket of pseudo-cosiness that R2 has always been about – let’s reduce the past to background music for eating jam and scones, or painting the shed, don’t scare the grannies in Arbroath or the flower-shop owners in Winchester, let’s pretend “Brown-Eyed Girl” was a hit, that the Undertones only ever made one record and that nasty characters like G*ry Gl*tt*r never existed. Oh, and those Occupy protestors are just lazy students besmirching the ancient nobility of St Paul’s – listen to R2’s Cameron lickarse news bulletins, or rather, don’t.

Yes I know I don’t have to listen. That’s not the point.

Did you see that JKing and GGlitter are now "allowed to be shown" on the BBC4 reruns of TOTP?

Yes indeed. Also that both are featured on R2’s Sounds Of The 20th Century series (although didn’t the early bits air some years ago as The Rock & Roll Years?). Presumably when it’s a documentary the rules are different.

However, the POTP audience are one of the most notorious stick-in-the-mud audiences R2 has (and that’s saying something) so no late nineties or noughties charts with all that loud, paracetamol-inducing dance and rap and R&B call-it-music? and presumably the only way GG’s records will get re-aired will be after he’s died and everyone can say: “oh what a terrible man he was but he did make some great records, it’s a shame…”

Current problem with POTP pinpointed by Saturday’s programme.

1964 – very fine hour of hits, some of them hardly ever played on the radio, Blackburn obviously in his element.

1983 – it’s the old Dale disease; skim past all the good ones, the ones some of us might have tuned in to hear (“That Was Then But This Is Now,” “Synchronicity II,” “Hey You (The Rocksteady Crew),” even though two of these were climbing) and play all the slow and/or boring ones – George Benson (which was nearly out of the chart), Donna Summer & Musical Youth, Status Fucking Quo – so as not to upset flower-shop owners or shed-painters.

OK so it’s clearly Blackburn’s tastes but couldn’t they have picked someone whose tastes are a little less hidebound?

Surprised Tone wouldn't like "Rocksteady crew" but hey (you)

In other news: twenty-eight years of hard searching and still scientists can find no tune in "Only For Love" by Limahl. "I think we've got another Mary Rose on our hands," quipped Time Team beefcake Mick "Mick" Aston.

True tale: I remember looking in record shops in Budapest, in the year before they separated from the USSR, and found many many copies of the Limahl solo album. "Yup", I thought, "they can't even shift them here!"