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1969 Rolf Harris: Two Little Boys

Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is renowned for many things, but pop punditry is not one of them. Nevertheless, of her few recorded pronouncements in this field, two appear within these pages. The first was 'Telstar', which she considered to be a 'rousing' tune, but she made the ultimate statement any music fan could make to Roy Plomley on 'Desert Island Discs' when she listed 'Two Little Boys' as her all time favourite song. How big a pinch of salt this could be taken with is debateable (and I'll ignore my own prejudices that usually regard Thatcher's approval of anything as the kiss of death), but clearly something within Morse and Madden's 1902 song struck a chord with her.

Originally made popular by Harry Lauder, 'Two Little Boys' is a fable of childhood friendship carried over into adulthood where a past kind act of a boy is reciprocated in later years by the man when the two go to war. After one is injured in battle, the other comes to his aid saying "Did you think I would leave you dying when there's room on my horse for two? Climb up here Joe, we'll soon be flying, I can go just as fast with two" - you can almost see the one time PM's head nodding in approval; mutual self help with no call on the state to lend a hand by paying disability benefits or providing funds for a new horse (and with the money saved probably used to fund tax breaks for horse breeders). Excellent.

Not that 'Two Little Boys' is right wing propaganda per se - it's a morality tale presented in simplistic broad brush strokes that a child would understand. And Rolf sings it in a good natured, unselfconscious 'can't really sing but I'll have a go' voice that any parent would use to sing their children to sleep, and in so doing there's an intimacy in his vocal that keeps the sentimentality down to acceptable levels. Not to the point that I myself would ever listen to this for pleasure you understand, but for the right person at the right time then chances are it can always bring a lump to the throat, especially at Christmas. And maybe such a simple tale of comradeship and togetherness is a fitting way to close the decade we know as 'The Sixties'; after all, as Auden wrote: "We must love one another or die".

1969 The Archies: Sugar, Sugar

Well let's shoo the elephant out of the room before we start - The Archies were not a 'real' band. Not only that, they weren't a 'manufactured' band a la The Monkees either; The Archies went even in that the fab five of Archie, Reggie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica were cartoon characters from TV's The Archie Show. And all some thirty years before Gorillaz. But then still further than that again, while the cartoon facade of Gorillaz was never meant to fully obscure the players behind it, the session men who gave life to The Archies remained suitably anonymous - we weren't meant to know who they were because The Archies were the band. Full stop.

Fine. I don't have a problem with that. And after the passage of so much time it seems futile to be still labour it - who remembers 'The Archie Show' now? Nobody in the UK anyway - the show was never screened here, meaning that the song was always the thing and, being of the bubblegum variety, it's not going to be everyone's 'thing' whether fronted by cartoons or not. After all, the Oxford Online Dictionary defines bubblegum as "chiefly North American pop music that is catchy and repetitive and designed to appeal especially to teenagers: rockers hate bubblegum pop". Ah. Now we're getting down to it. Hate on sight. Not 'proper' music. And so on.

A Jeff Barry co-write, 'Sugar, Sugar' has a lean, no fat pop engine that motors the song along its way, only stopping off at the detour of the bridges to pick up extra passengers for the journey and in such a way, 'Sugar, Sugar' builds nicely via the addition of those layers of instruments and vocals to the simmering pot. And I say simmer because 'Sugar Sugar' keeps a lid on its excitement to ensure it never boils over - the cumulative effect generates interest just to see where it's going next until it's almost a disappointment when it fades to a close without ever really letting rip . But that in itself provides a neat hook to play it again. And 'Sugar, Sugar' is choc full of hooks.

If you're the type of teenager it was designed to appeal to that is - if you're a 'rocker' who hates bubblegum then nothing here is going to convert (though even on this low heat, the background cries of "Pour a little sugar on it baby, I'm gonna make your life so sweet, yeah yeah yeah" has more life and vitality than hoary old rockers Def Leppard managed in their song of almost the same name. So one-nil there). But even if you think the genre is the work of the antichrist, it would take an exceptionally closed ear not to appreciate the detail this particular devil is springing from.

1969 Bobbie Gentry: I'll Never Fall In Love Again

Songs from the shows are there to be interpreted rather than covered. Just as we don't consider a Symphony Orchestra as 'covering' Beethoven, neither should we talk about (for example) Elaine Paige "covering" 'Memory' Not within the context of the show anyway. It's a point I could have made regarding no small number of the singles we've already encountered, and I'm only raising it here because I've literally this minute learned that 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again' is actually a showtune from a musical ('Promises Promises') and not simply another stand alone song in the Bacharach and David canon.

Does that make any difference? I think so - context is important; it's more convenient to judge an interpretation of such a song by reference to its context. Take (for another example) Steven Sondheim's 'Send In The Clowns'. In the context of it's parent musical 'A Little Night Music' it's a bitter song of jealousy and regret. The opening lines "Isn't it rich? Are we a pair?" were written to be hissed and spat staccato rather than have the syllables stretched out in an attempt to make them rhyme and scan pub singer style. Which virtually every singer who tackles this great song in isolation tries to do (check out the Martin Jacque's vocal in The Tiger Lilies version to hear how it should really be done).

So how is 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again' meant to be sung? Well not with bitterness for a start - how could what is one of my favourite rhymes in all popular music ever be bitter?* "What do you get when you kiss a guy? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia. After you do, he'll never phone ya": there's a good natured pissed off-ness about it, a self aware humour that suggests the narrator has been here before and that it's par for the course ("So far at least until tomorrow, I'll never fall in love again" anyway) and my views on any version always depends on how well the singer nails it - that 'ya' is as vital as Sondheim's 'rich' - 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again' isn't a song for the eloquent.

Gentry does ok, albeit in a humour-lite kind of way, but my reaction to this remains the same whenever I hear it; I like it a lot up to a point, after which it simply stops being enjoyable. Her take opens with a husky vocal of cracked soul that reminds me Dusty Springfield behind frosted glass. But then it gains confidence in its telling with the fragility replaced with a dry urgency that suggests Gentry can't wait to get to the end.

Whereas she invests the initial "What do you get when you fall in love?" question with a genuine wry confusion, by its final go round they've become just words on the page as she loses interest in their meaning both within the context of the song and as an artist. The playfulness evaporates and leaves nothing in its place. Maybe a certain indifference is to be expected - Gentry is a talented songwriter in her own right working outside her usual genre on this - but its an indifference that makes this a good version rather than a great one.


* For a prime example of how to make a total balls-up of 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again' then look no further than Ricky Ross's quivering lip delivery on Deacon Blue's angst soaked 1990 misinterpretation. Though on second thoughts, don't - instead, make a bargain with your god that you'll happily die four minutes before your allotted time in exchange for never having to sit through the four minutes of that song for as long as you live. It's a fair exchange, trust me on that one.

1969 Serge Gainsbourg And Jane Birkin: Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus

Us Brits have always liked a bit of sauce. In the dark, pre-internet days we had to get it where we could and the late sixties/early seventies were a fertile breeding ground for it to crop up in all manner of places. Hammer quickly realised that a flash of flesh from Ingrid Pitt or Kate O'Mara in their films would attract jaded punters perhaps not usually interested in the antics of vampires and such while elsewhere, the 'Carry On' series made a selling point of Barbara Windsor and her catapulting bra. For the ladies, the sight of Robin Askwith's ever pneumatic arse in the 'Confessions' films provided treats galore. All good clean fun.

Not smut mind. We Brits have never cared for smut. Not in public anyway. Sid James yakking over Bab's Windsor's bare backside was one thing, Maria Schneider's dairy based anal lube was quite another. No good clean fun there. And it took a landmark sixties court case to decide that "Nay nay! Fuck's only what you do. animals fuck. But cunt's a lot more than that. It's thee, dost see: an' tha'rt a lot besides an animal, aren't ter? - even ter fuck? Cunt! Eh, that's the beauty o' thee, lass!" was actually artistic and not obscene smut out to degrade all who read it.*

Which brings me nicely to 'Je t'aime... moi non plus', a song that to the powers that be fell on the wrong side of that sauce/smut highwire to become the UK's first banned number one. Yes, it was banned in a typical British knee jerk reaction to being faced with something different and a bit off colour (foreign too, and you know what they're like). Because it's fair to say that to date, there hadn't been anything quite like 'Je t'aime... moi non plus' in the charts before.

Music from the continent was no stranger to our shores, and the annual Eurovision Song Contest made sure that Europop had its fans, but that genre was basically our own Britpop (sorry, bit early for that I know), albeit with the substance removed and replaced by air to make it bounce harder. Cheerful yet disposable, it never found a willing wider audience in a country notoriously xenophobic to anything not sung in its own mother tongue. Whatever else 'Je t'aime... moi non plus' was, it wasn't Europop.

Writer Serge Gainsbourg was as French/Euro as the Eiffel Tower, but his song of love replaces the usually jolly oompah sound and fixed grin with an eyes half closed clipped bass and red light lit organ coo that personifies a stereotypical soundtrack to those smutty (not saucy) Continental films where girls of loose morals struggled to keep their drawers on. It sounds like smut all by itself, the high class muzak equivalent of David Rose's 'The Stripper', yet eyebrows would have been raised further by the sound of British born Birkin groaning in the throes of orgasm over the top of it.

And yet Gainsbourg's song was not intended to be a titillating seven inches of porn for the raincoat brigade; he himself claimed it was 'about' the impossibly of physical love, but whether you swallow that or not, there's a definite irony in the title's "I love you - me neither" that's lost both in translation and the heavy handed sounds of the boudoir that the song conjures up. Heavy handed, now that's a key phrase and one that sums up why I've never been all that fussed on this.

In 'Je t'aime... moi non plus' I can hear neither sauce nor smut, but neither can I hear the lofty ideals Serge was allegedly aiming for. The porn film (let's be honest) music sets a nice scene for Birkin's faux orgasmic gasps, but they ring with all the genuiness of a mid-price hooker with one eye on the clock and taken together they render the song into overcooked stodge, more Reader's Wives than Playboy. Serge himself sounds too wry and arch for the scenario he's found himself in, and though his remove may go someway to emphasise the point he was trying to make, non Francophiles have to take it on face value and on that level it's laboured and irritating. But still, good clean fun eh?


* From DH Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Love', first published 1928 but not legally in the UK until 1960.

1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival: Bad Moon Rising

The archetypical American bar band, in my own crazed imagination I've always seen Creedence Clearwater Revival as a Hanna Barbera version of The Band. John Fogerty's songs are no less a faithful, rootsy de/reconstruction of American mores past and present than Robbie Robertson's, but rather than the sepia toned, copper plate photography of the latter, Fogerty's are brittle splurges of full colour music to chug-a-lug your beer to rather than soundtracking drowning your sorrows in it.

That's not to paint Fogerty as court jester to Robertson's wise elder - such simplicity is wide of the mark and 'Bad Moon Rising's forewarning of apocalyptic devastation being a case in point. "Hope you got your things together. Hope you are quite prepared to die" rasps Fogerty over an electric skiffle metal shuffle that's a short, sharp poke in the chest tailor made for the jukebox. Like most of Fogerty's songs, 'Bad Moon Rising' does nothing fancy, but it does it with great economy of expression. And if the world is going to end, then you may as well sing along as it all goes up in flames, preferably with a glass in your hand.

1969 Zager And Evans: In The Year 2525 (Exordium And Terminus)

Pulpy sc-fi and popular music aren't total strangers, but it's a rare example of the genre that gets to number one. But with the moon landings a contemporary concern, science fiction in 1969 was becoming science fact and 'In The Year 2525' jacks into the public interest in that 'nowness' quite shamelessly (the song was actually written in 1964 and originally released in 1968 so I guess it needed that 'stopped clock is right twice a day' good fortune to give it an unimproveable context).*

Not that we're obviously in the space age here - 'In The Year 2525' opens out onto a spaghetti western soundtrack of Spanish guitar and mariachi trumpet before locking into a rail straight beat that marches the lyric through the centuries like Rod Taylor in 'The Time Machine' as mankind hurtles toward its destiny. "In the year 3535, ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies. Everything you think, do, or say is in the pill you took today" - hokum then? Yes indeed, of 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' proportions, and it doesn't help that Rick Evans' high and mighty vocal casts him as a would be Nostradamus demanding to be taken seriously; it makes the clog handed lyrics and crowbar rhymes faintly ludicrous, especially when that highfalutin title promising something approaching quasi academic stature.

In its favour, 'In The Year 2525' eschews the temptation to go all 'computer font' and doesn't pander to any of the (then) new fangled futuristic strokes or gimmickry that would have dated (a 1983 version of this by Visage comes stuffed with boxfresh eighties synth washes and noodles and has aged with far less grace). And just as you wouldn't read HG Wells for scientific accuracy, there's a lot of fun to be had here. As long as you take it on its own terms and turn a blind eye to its overt humourlessness.


* Though the fact that David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' only made number 5 that year could be enough to blow this little theory out of the water.

1969 The Rolling Stones: Honky Tonk Women

After their dance rock classic 'Screamadelica in 1990), Primal Scream followed it up with 'Give Out But Don't Give Up', a double album with a William Egglestone photograph of an electric confederate flag reflected in water on the front cover and a photo of Funkadelic's Eddie Hazel on the back. Which was kind of all you needed to know about what was in the grooves. Chief Screamer Bobby Gillespie's intention was to pay homage to the idealised decadence and authenticity commonly associated with a core of key bands from the early to mid seventies.

And if the cover wasn't enough, the avid music spotter could probably pin down the musical influences from the song titles alone - 'Jailbird', '(I'm Gonna) Cry Myself Blind', 'Big Jet Plane', 'Struttin', 'Sad And Blue', 'Funky Jam' - it's a studious roll call of left field electric Americana, of rock songs bathed in the pathos of country, juiced up with libido and testosterone, fed on a diet of drugs and Jack Daniels and then rubbed in the dirt on the ground, but not to the point that it becomes unrecognisable and unsingalongable (step forward Captain Beefheart). The album was not a success.

"I met a gin soaked barroom queen in Memphis" - to modern ears, 'Honky Tonk Women' can sound as much a parody/homage to all this as Primal Scream's does, but in 1969 this was something new(ish). So much so that the template the Stones laid down on 'Honky Tonk Women' is one that has been slavishly traced by innumerable acts since, all keen to tap into a source to inform their ideal for what a rock band should be - sex and drugs and rock and roll troubadours high on flamboyance yet mired in sleaze - without having to bother going back to the source and all that blues/R&B nonsense.*

The famous Jimmy Miller cowbells and Charlie's slo-mo drum thud intro give way to a guitar riff that, in less than three seconds, plugs in, warms up and snaps out its wares, making 'Honky Tonk Women' sound like the first unrehearsed take of a brand new song improvised on the spot, unsure of where it's going but enough hesitancy in getting there to let Jagger sing the gaps with the transatlantic drawl he'd perfected in interviews - Jagger once found no satisfaction in consumerist America, but he finds it now in spades in the southern Gothic mythos of a Byrds-go-country-then-back-to-electric vibe. Tight but loose, I believe it's called.

'Honky Tonk Women's distillation of influences heralded a new genre that was to have legs far beyond its own inherent worth - The Faces, Aerosmith, Guns & Roses etc all made a decent fist in their wake, virtually every west coast eighties hair metal band did not. And the band itself weren't immune either - 'Honky Tonk Women' can now be seen as the birthplace of the band that the Stones would become in the seventies and beyond, a three dimensional tag of music and image that would come to define and wear them down to the one dimension of cardboard cut-outs of the band they once were long after they'd tried to outgrow it. But by itself, 'Honky Tonk Women' is a superb single.


* I don't think I've explained myself very well here - I had in mind an artcile on Oasis from the nineties (which I can't for the life of me source) that said (something like) "John Lennon was influenced by music hall, Chuck Berry, surrealism, Elvis Presley, dada, Lewis Carrol, Eddie Cochran, Picasso, Edward Lear, Bob Dylan, skiffle etc etc. Noel Gallagher is influenced by John Lennon."

1969 Thunderclap Newman: Something In The Air

"Hand out the arms and ammo, we're going to blast our way through here" - 'Something In The Air' doesn't want for aspiration; it's motivation that's in short supply. As manufactured an act as you'll get, Thunderclap Newman were a band created by Pete Townsend solely to front the songs written by John 'Speedy' Keen, multi-instrumentalist and former driver for The Who. Yet for all its rabble rousing, Keen's vocal is whiny and hesitant, the voice of an armchair General longing for change but lacking the power, inspiration or motivation to initiate it. Change certainly WAS in the air in 1969, but 'Something In The Air' is a song more of hope than observation and, while by no stretch of the imagination an 'answer' song to it, the inherent lethargy of 'Like One Thousand Violins' (by neo psychedelic indie band One Thousand Violins from 1985) is nearer the tone of this with its "You say there's something in the air, that's just smoke from all those cigarettes" capturing the hesitancy of a narrator who finds every excuse in the book not to speak to the girl of his dreams. 'Something In The Air' has the same elegiac quality of regret at an opportunity not taken which, as the sixties dribbled to a close and the seventies dribbled into life, would see the repeated "we have got to get it together...now" acquire a hue of irony that probably wasn't intended and which makes 'Something In The Air' a song more fitted to accompany archive footage of civil rights violations rather than any victories of the people.

1969 The Beatles: The Ballad Of John And Yoko

After three straight McCartney penned entries it's fitting that The Beatles' final number one should come from John Lennon. Fitting, though there's shame in it not being a more worthy send-off; singer/songwriters making themselves the focal point of their own tunes is nothing new either now or then, but they're usually presented in a suitably couched removal that allows the listener to say on their own terms "Yes, I know exactly what you mean". 'The Ballad Of John And Yoko' is 'about' John Lennon and no other and as such belongs to a select subset of autobiographical songs written by bands about themselves (a subset that Mott The Hoople - 'The Ballad Of Mott', The Clash - 'Clash City Rockers', Deep Purple - 'Smoke On The Water', Felt - 'Ballad Of The Band' etc also fall into).*

So what's it all about? Well in March 1969, John married Yoko Ono and took her to Europe on honeymoon, a chain of events that 'The Ballad Of John And Yoko' documents in the voyeuristic detail associated with overly keen Tweets or Facebook updates in these latter days. "Standing in the dock at Southampton", "Finally made the plane into Paris, honey mooning down by the Seine", "Caught an early plane back to London" - it goes on. And like the majority of Facebook updates, it takes a certain self cantered chutzpah to think that anybody gives a toss. I know I don't, and you won't need me to tell you this is not The Beatles at their best; Lennon pins his tale to a simple busker tune with the augmenting of guitar fills and some recurring "Christ you know it ain't easy"s to sharpen the edges. But it's never sharp enough I'm afraid - 'The Ballad Of John And Yoko' is ephemera, a B side at best, and if it was a 'this is my life' pen portrait from anyone other than Lennon, then nobody would give a toss.


* Actually, Mott provided two entries in this field - their 'Saturday Gigs' covered the same ground.

1969 Tommy Roe: Dizzy

Like 'Mony Mony' before it, 'Dizzy' is something better known to me via a latter day makeover, in this case one supplied by Vic Reeves and The Wonder Stuff in 1991. And it's a version I've always taken a shine too mainly through Reeves' relish of his new pop star role and the verve in which he goes at the song (with the 'Stuff adding a suitably rock thump). Which is why, on a side by side comparison, Roe's version sags like a wet lettuce sandwich; for a bubble gum star singing a prime bubblegum tune, his 'Dizzy' has little sparkle and less fizz in it's lightweight lumber. "Dizzy, I'm so dizzy my head is spinning like a whirlpool it never ends. And it's You girl makin' it spin" - Roe sounds curiously distracted from his own lyric to the point it becomes debateable whether ANY girl would really make him dizzy, even if she sat on his lap. Naked. The song itself is fine - Vic proved that - but this resides down in deepest Dullsville.

1969 The Beatles With Billy Preston: Get Back

Completing a hat trick of Beatles number ones guided by the hand of Paul McCartney, 'Get Back' is another ride in reverse gear to the basics of the music that originally inspired the band. Well in one aspect anyway - at heart 'Get Back' might be a lumpen rock and roll rumble born out of studio jam sessions, yet in its extended riff/guitar solo/riff/organ solo/riff/guitar solo structure I hear on one hand portents of the worst of (gulp) prog rock noodlings and on the other I hear the birth of the output of some well meaning but misguided seventies AOR behemoths grimly slugging their way through a two week version of 'Whipping Post'.

Ok, I'm probably taking things to the nth degree here, but not to the point that credibility snaps - one of my main beefs with both those avenues of music was their annoying tendency to dress themselves up in bells in whistles of self importance/'look at me' musicianship to hide the fact they didn't have a lot to say in the first place, and in its shaggy dog tale of 'JoJo' and 'Loretta', 'Get Back' plays out like a Yes triple in microcosm. The guitar driven backbone of the song rambles along with no discernible purpose in an overly neat and fussy manner that's only broken by each of the players having their moment in the spot; all that's missing is a Ringo drum solo. And yet for a rock tune worked up in the studio and presented as a jam, there's a stiffness about 'Get Back' and the myriad takes that were used to patch it all together that's suggestive of a band playing with clenched teeth. Which by that stage of their career they probably were - The Beatles weren't quite finished by the time 'Get Back' was recorded, but it has the definite air of something winding down to a close.


* It's common enough knowledge that, for at least part of its torturously long gestation, the intention behind 'Get Back' was a satire on Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood's speech' called 'The Commonwealth Song' ("get back to where you came from"). It might have been interesting, but ironic racism is a ferocious line to walk and there's nothing in McCartney's canon before or since to suggest he had the chops to pull it off, so it's just as well this plan was dropped. I've often wondered if Billy Preston's co-credit was designed to offset any racism charges - I'm not sure he does enough by himself on the song to deserve it.

1969 Desmond Dekker & The Aces: Israelites

There had been flashes and sparks of its influence previously in the charts, but Desmond Dekker's 'Israelites' is the first bona fide reggae track to top the UK charts. When presented with that kind of statistic, it leads me to question why? Why this and not, say Millie's 'My Boy Lollipop', The Skatalites 'Guns Of Navarone' or Dekker's own '007 Shantytown'? And why is it that 'Israelites' - a basic B flat tune with a vocal that's often difficult to understand - has passed into genre legend, a song that All Music claim as a "timeless masterpiece that knew no boundaries"?

To my mind, the 'no boundaries' comment nails the song dead - 'Israelites' walks a high wire with aplomb. It's very title is pure Rastafarian, and it would take more than a passing knowledge of the religion to appreciate the "poor me, the Israelite' refrain, a move that at a stroke short circuits any accusation that Dekker's pop tune and presentation is offering an eye on the prize dumbing down of the genre. By basing his suffering and woes in a Biblical context, 'The Israelites' neatly joins the dots between classic Rasta culture, contemporary rude boy experience and a more general everyman concern - as understated as they are, the lyrics to 'The Israelites' have the blues based resonance of a 'Sixteen Tons'.

"Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir, so that every mouth can be fed/You load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt". You don't need dreadlocks to appreciate the world weary stance of slogging your guts to stand still. And if Tennessee Ernie was quick with his fists, Dekker too warns "don't wanna end up like Bonnie and Clyde", a threat of violence in its invocation of a down at heel couple who tried to build a better life via the barrel of a gun. Danger then, but it's a blink and you'll miss it taunt that's buried in a song with bounce and smile enough to let anyone join in the party and then buried further again by Dekker's sweet vocal.

Ah yes, the vocal - there's that famous Maxell tape television advert from 1990 that gets great mileage from the vocal's lack of clarity - "My ears are alight" and so on. All good fun I'm sure, but the no concessions of Dekker's thick patois slang adds further to the authenticity of the song and could also be hiding a multitude of sins - is he really singing "My wife and kids they fuck off and leave me" I wonder? The voice of the gutter crossed with the voice of the ghetto and the voice of the people - back to back with 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine', 'Israelites' seals a double whammy of the very best that black popular music had to offer. Put simply, it doesn't get much better than this.

1969 Marvin Gaye: I Heard It Through The Grapevine

We've already had 'poppy' Motown from The Supremes and 'shouty' Motown from The Four Tops, but on 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine', a different, altogether more 'grown up' face of Motown is presented to the public. On this version anyway - though he co-wrote it, Gaye wasn't the first to record the song; both Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and Gladys Knight and the Pips had got there first with versions that, true to form, were both a little bit poppy and a little bit shouty, but in grinding the track down to its heartbeat, Gaye does neither.

Whereas Smokey and Gladys could have been raging to themselves on the song's theme of lover horsing around behind their backs, Gaye is directly addressing his one time partner whose love he thought was solid. Gaye's 'Grapevine' opens with an extended prowling lope around its prey that before Gaye pounces to try and catch her off guard with the upper hand statement "Ooh, I bet you're wondering how I knew", and from there on in, Gaye delivers a vocal pitched perfectly between the anger of betrayal and the restraint of self respect.

"You could have told me yourself, that you love someone else" - would that have made it any better? Probably not, but Gaye's apportioning of blame is not as forthright as Gladys and Smokey's and, being tempered with the fear of overplaying his hand and pushing her away for good, the desperation is more pronounced and more effective because of it - for Gaye, the not knowing and the attendant doubt is somehow better than getting a definitive answer to the one question he doesn't want to ask.

But for all his restraint, the hurt of finding out second hand that his relationship is on the rocks shows through the cracks that the Funk Brothers' horrorshow string crashes and voodoo bassline break open to reveal the confusion and paranoia within (IS she really fooling around? DOES she really have a "plan" to make him blue? Or is Gaye feeding off the Chinese whispers of those backing vocals that play understated like voices inside his own head?) within until 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine' boils and steams like the inside of a pressure cooker, with Gaye's lack of overt anger providing no release to defuse it - think Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean' had tension to burn? Well this is the source Quincy Jones drew it from.

'I Heard It Through The Grapevine' oozes an adult class and sophistication that was unusual for a Motown recording - in this case, the little girls wouldn't know but the men would understand. A more perfect single you'd be hard pressed to find.

1969 Peter Sarstedt: Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)

In an interview for the NME, the late John Peel famously set out his detestation of this song, naming it as one of the worst things he'd ever heard. I've tried to put that comment to the back of my mind, but it's difficult; when somebody I admire(d) so much makes such a definitive statement as to quality then I tend to sit up and take notice. It doesn't follow that I'll automatically agree, but their viewpoint will colour my own, though in this case I'm happy to meet John more than halfway.

I've often seen a paradox in the fact that us Brits tend to venerate the culture of the continent as something to admire in any field other than popular music. We're happy to trumpet the marvels of (for example) Italian cooking or French wine, but their home-grown pop stars can barely get arrested in our domestic charts. "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)" aims for the best of both worlds by nailing it's Francophile colours to the mast from the off with a waltzing accordion mimicking a tune ripe to cue a Brel or Gainsborough stepping up to the microphone. Alas, instead we get the very British Peter Sarstedt adding a hint of 'Carry On Napoleon' to his accent whenever it's required to force his words to scan and rhyme. Which is quite often all told.

Because in order to add some of that continental sophistication to his rags to riches story of a woman called "Marie Claire", Sarstedt pulls his 'Boys Book Of French Culture' off the shelf to fashion some truly torturous rhymes from the entries therein to describe her lifestyle - "St Michel/Sasha Distell", "Zizi Jeanmaire/pearls in your hair", "Juan-les-Pines/an even suntan" - on and on it goes in a bucket list of French cliche and yet for all that the very opening line tells us his Naples born "Marie Claire" talks like a German (Marlene Dietrich). Say what?

And to what end is Sarstedt aiming I wonder? I'm still no clearer on what his/the narrator's point is in continuously badgering her with "Where do you go to my lovely, when you're alone in your bed" and he snootily dismisses her virtues as if they were vices - why is he so intent on reminding her of her past ("So look into my face Marie-Claire, and remember just who you are")? Both were children in rags "touched with a burning ambition to shake off their lowly-born tags" so is this the tut tut of a jealous man keen to see her back down in the hole he's never managed to climb out of? And how very British if it is.

And this Marie Claire, just how did she get out of the gutter to a life amongst the jet set? Sheer hard work (she studied at the Sorbonne, apparently), fortuitous circumstance or is there an accusation of sleeping her way to the top? We're not told because, in such a black and white presentation, it matters not a jot, not least because by the end Sarstedt reveals he knew all along where his lovely went to when alone in her bed, making the preceding four minutes little more than a pointless exercise of spiteful baiting.

And therein lies my main beef with "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)"- it's superficially shallow and inherently mean spirited with it's own ridiculous awfulness dressed up in a clumsy attempt to dab a touch of class to a gallon bottle of cheap house plonk by adding some hi-falutin French phrases and a line drawing of a vineyard on the label. I don't share Mr Peel's view that it's one of the worst things ever committed to vinyl, but, sacrebleu and zut alors, I wouldn't shed too many tears if I never heard it again.

1969 Amen Corner: (If Paradise Is) Half As Nice

For a song less than three minutes long, I'm left wondering whether '(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice' is a middle distance runner that starts off too fast and runs out of steam or simple a hundred meter sprinter who just isn't fast enough. Certainly, the song is quick out of the traps on it's main "la la la" melody line before hooking up with its chorus in a one/two combination that's an impressive onslaught. Which is fine while it lasts because the melody is a strong one, the sort of tune that Oasis would borrow from in the nineties. Strong, but no knockout, and by the one minute ten mark it all runs out of things to say and instead recycles to an uninspired limp across the finish line. '(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice' is Latin in origin and needs a bit of fire, but Andy Fairweather-Low's vocal, always an acquired taste, doesn't provide the same gutsy filler that Lucio Battisti does on the La Ragazza 77 original or the cod drama of Patty Pravo's version, making Amen Corner's song a limp salad where a bit of beef wouldn't have gone amiss. And though it's usually an uninspiring aspiration, I'd quite like to hear Liam Gallagher have a crack at a souped up version.

1969 The Move: Blackberry Way

'Blackberry Way' is another of those songs I seem to have known for almost as long as I've been conscious of music. And why shouldn't I - it's got a chorus that only an iron will wouldn't get taken in by and it dominates the song the way the Eiffel Tower dominates the Paris skyline. I think if I'd heard it played on the radio any time between the age of one and ten then it would have stuck.

But more than that, it's opening line "Blackberry Way, absolutely pouring down with rain. It's a terrible day" always struck me as so defiantly, almost mockingly English in its trading on the country's obsession with the weather to the point that I question whether any other nationality could have come up with it? As such, I tended to see it as part of the love/hate nostalgia beloved of other contemporary English bands like The Kinks (writer Roy Wood has himself acknowledged its probable debt to the equally nostalgic 'Penny Lane'). On a superficial level, these are probably fair observations, but peer below the surface and 'Blackberry Way' has more to offer than a hummable tune.

For a start, nothing about the song feels 'right'- the shrill way Wood sings each line as if it's a question plays tug of war with the dragging drum beat and minor key cello drones that constantly threaten to stop the song dead in its tracks and start pulling it under; 'Blackberry Way' plays out like a dream with only one foot in reality like a smeared watercolour left out in that 'pouring rain'.

And I think that's important - though there are overtones of psychedelia here, this rain here is literal. It's not the multicolour drench of The Beatles 'Rain' and neither has it the optimism of The Move's own previous 'Flowers In The Rain' - 'Blackberry Way' is all about the self pity. The skewed presentation reminds of an aural Expressionistic film, a waterlogged Dr Caligari landscape that the narrator aimlessly wanders with no direction home, pondering the recent split with his lover (hence the "terrible day") and self flagellating all the while. "I'm incredibly down" whines Wood, comparing himself to boats on the park lake "Just like myself they are neglected" in the kind of self centred, pointed/meaningless observation that's born of the hypersensitive misery the broken hearted know so well. And all wrapped in that bow of a chorus. Self pity never sounded so good.

1969 Fleetwood Mac: Albatross

As befits their revolving door of personnel changes, there can be few bands with as schizophrenic an output as Fleetwood Mac. Sure, line-up changes in bands are nothing new - people come and people go but in generally there remains a constant thread in the music that's synonymous with the name of the on the tin. Broadly speaking, the 'major periods' of Fleetwood Mac can be split into the late sixties blues based band that Peter Green fronted and the mid seventies AOR monster led by Lindsay Buckingham. And yet perversely, their sole number one belongs to neither phase; yes, this is very much Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, but the trademark sting of his R&B guitar licks are sidelined in favour of a languid wash of an instrumental that tips its hat to that curious phenomenon of exotica. Or, more accurately, ambience perhaps - I can hear echoes of the bass and timpani pulse beat of 'Albatross' and Green's subtle tremolo lead in Brian Eno's ' Deep Blue Day', and The KLF too would use the main call and response guitar motif as a recurring theme throughout their 1990 'Chill Out' album. Like the best ambient recording, the minimalism of 'Albatross' is striking - it's the notes that Green doesn't play and the two chord structure of the entire tune that he doesn't play them on that evoke the vastness of ocean and the wingspan of the bid crossing it as surely as 'Telstar' evoked images of a satellite beaming images from space; a cinematic vision that doesn't require an accompanying film to confirm what the mind is 'seeing'. Which is all you can ask from an instrumental. A gorgeous tune.

1969 The Marmalade: Ob-La-Di - Ob-La-Da

After 'doing' New Orleans boogie woogie on 'Lady Madonna', 'Ob-La-D i- Ob-La-Da' was Paul McCartney's touchy feely stab at ska. And whatever your views are on The Beatles song, they're likely to be broadly similar to your views on this - in its telling of Desmond and Molly's domestic bliss, McCartney's cut has a throwaway bounce and breeze (that's out of all proportion to the length of time it took to record). Marmalade slightly tighten the rhythm and drop the comic interjections (including the infamous gender bending 'mistake' in the last verse) to make sure it found a pop audience, yet despite the trims, it's Jamaican roots shine through, perhaps even moreso than on 'Baby Come Back' - is that a slight patois that singer Dean Ford is trying hard to pretend he's not trying to adopt?* It's too happy to hate, but there's little here to admire save the cross genre journeyman writing chops of McCartney and his willingness to dabble. Is that enough? Probably not, but Marmalade/Shmarmalade - this would have been a hit for anyone.


* To ram the point home, there's a contemporary YouTube clip of them performing this while a label for 'Rose's West Indian Marmalade' flashes behind them in a very unsubliminal bit of messaging acrossing. The wags.

1968 The Scaffold: Lilly The Pink

It must have seemed in the late sixties that you couldn't throw a stone at a pile of singles without hitting one with a Beatles connection; in this case, Scaffold's Mike McGear was Paul McCartney's brother (though 'Lily The Pink' is more in keeping with Lennon's music hall influences than anything else 'Beatley'). Based on the folk song 'The Ballad Of Lydia Pinkham', 'Lily The Pink' keeps the main tune and theme of the older song (the real life Pinkham developed and marketed a compound tonic that supposedly cured 'women's problems' in the late nineteenth century), but then populates it with a procession of re-written characters that amount to little more than a production line of in-jokes. There's no reason why the casual listener shouldn't be amused by "Mr Frears", "brother Tony" and "Jennifer Eccles" too, but the biggest hobble here is that, for a knees up Christmas party drinking song, 'Lily The Pink' is remarkably flat and lifeless - four and a half minutes of sixth form Goons with A levels humour that never breaks sweat. No doubt it would raise a chuckle amongst its peers, but it's clearly wary about going too far lest the headmaster disapprove and contact their parents.

On a point of trivia, Jack Bruce plays bass on this, so at least some interest is generated.

1968 Hugo Montenegro And His Orchestra: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

I think the first album that ever caught my eye (I loved the cover and I pestered my parents to buy it for me) was 'Big Terror Movie Themes' by Geoff Love and his Orchestra. Love was a British easy listening bandleader who put out a slew of themed albums in the seventies linked around a genre of film and all given the Geoff Love makeover. Thus, 'Big Terror' collected various horror/thriller film music, 'Big War Movie Themes', 'Big Bond Movie Themes' and Big Love Movie Themes' were self explanatory, as was the inevitable 'Big Western Movie Themes' which contained his version of 'The Good, The Bad And The Ugly'. Which is where I first heard it. Happy days.*

It was only later that I found out that Love wasn't the first to plough this particular furrow and that his attempt at this piece was at least more than one step removed from the original; Hugo Montenegro was an American bandleader who, in the sixties, produced a similar run of movie theme albums as Love was to (though Montenegro also composed original music for films himself) which led to this surprise 1968 hit based on the theme to the eponymous 1966 spaghetti western. As written by Ennio Morricone, 'The Good, The Bad And The Ugly' is a twitchy affair of whistles, flutes and gorilla grunts all separated by spaces and silences, tightly wrapping the tune in a dread of tension that forever threatens to explode into a violence ill suited to easy listening.

And just as Hollywood is forever accused of remaking and 'dumbing down' successful foreign films for a Western audience, Montenegro's take on it polyfills the dangerous cracks and rubs them smooth with a Tex Mex acoustic guitar fill that lightens the mood considerably. Easier on the ear certainly, but it's a move akin to cutting up and re-arranging a Picasso so that the eyes and mouth are all in the 'right' place to appease those who have no truck with Cubism. Morricone wasn't aiming for a pop audience when he wrote it, and whenever I hear his original score I see a shimmering desert landscape with a heat warped figure on a horse transversing the horizon. When I hear Montenegro, I see Colin from accounts in a fancy dress cowboy outfit carrying a cap gun. Vive le difference.


* As for Love, his version is a cover of Montenegro's arrangement, only weaker still. I've also come to appreciate that 'Big Terror's version of the 'Jaws' theme sounds like a fat man farting in an underfilled bath tub too. Ah well.

1968 Joe Cocker: With A Little Help From My Friends

And to complete a hat trick of Beatley number ones comes this version of track two from 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'. I've mentioned elsewhere about how I regard a good cover version as one that sets out to provide more than a simple carbon copy and instead at least tries to make it personal to the artist. As far as that goes, Cocker's take on 'With A Little Help From My Friends' is certainly unique - as played by The Beatles it's a jovial jaunt sung by Ringo Starr who's seeking assurance that he's not just the drummer in the band. Cocker turns it into a monsters of rock, Alice In Chains type dirge that's as serious as famine but which misses the point by furlongs.

When Ringo sings "What would you do if I sang out of tune?" it invokes a smile in the listener, not least because he is singing out of tune. And flat. But it's all ok because the rest of the band chip in to tell him it is - they're all in this together as mates and everybody goes home happy. Cocker stretches the song to twice the original length and huffs and puffs to blow the song over with help from a squally guitar (from Jimmy Page) and soul backing vocals (featuring Rosetta Hightower) that try their damnedest to inject some heavy duty sincerity but only end up making a sows ear out of a silk purse. 'With A Little Help From My Friends' was never something that would readily lend itself to such Jim Steinman in the dirt treatment, and while I'm aware the song has developed a kind of 'classic' or 'iconic' status in certain circles, I have to confess it leaves me cold as ice.

1968 Mary Hopkin: Those Were The Days

One thing I've noticed as I've travelled along this thing called life is that it's not uncommon for me to change my viewpoint on any given song from like to extreme dislike. Sometimes it goes further - I fond it hard to believe that in the mid eighties I (for a short time anyway), loved Chris deBurgh to distraction. I still have the albums I bought as proof and very now and again I'll take them down from the shelf and ponder in wonder at what the hell I ever saw in any of it. But see in them I did, albeit through an innocence and naivety that gave those songs a kind of meaning which age has since withered and the realisation that I no longer see the world through sixteen year old eyes tends to promote a sad shake of the head before I put them back in their proper place in my racks - unplayed yet undeniable (though you can read more of my deBurgh years here).

Conversely, 'Those Were The Days' is a song familiar from my seventies childhood and conspicuous in that it was something the 'me' of 'then' had little time or appreciation for. The whole 'message' of the song did not resonate with me at all. Even in my late teens I thought that Hopkin, barely older than I was, was far too shrill in telling her tale and just needed to get out more - 'these' were the days as far as I was concerned and would always be thus. In truth it's hard to be nostalgic when you have no past to speak of, but the passing of time has by default righted that particular 'wrong' and now, having experienced many 'taverns' and many dreams, I find 'Those Were The Days' has matured alongside me to the point where my views have taken a U turn.*

Far from shrill, I recognise now that Hopkin interprets the lyric with a wistful prettiness, invoking regret in a way that belies her own eighteen years. When she paints herself as an older 'lonely woman' it's more than characterisation or interpretation - it's entirely believable. And more than that, Hopkin gives the song a universal appeal perhaps not intend by lyricist Gene Raskin who put the English lyric to a Russian folk tune. Raskin's song was time and place specific in that it related to New York's White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, an important venue for the sixties folk scene whose passing the song laments. Hopkin negates such self indulgence by locating the song's heart in the simple passing of youthful joy and idealism but at the same time making it clear in the last verse that happiness is not solely the province of the young.

There's a Beatles connection here that wouldn't have hindered either - the first release on the band's new Apple label and a Paul McCartney production to boot, McCartney in turn is savvy enough to realise that Hopkin's voice is as big a star as the song itself and he gives it the room it needs to stress the open ended daydream on the verses, allowing the vocal to wind down before pushing the song's Russian origins to the fore on the clockwork klezmer dance chorus (which nods to Topol's recording of 'If I Were A Rich Man' from 'Fiddler On The Roof' that reached number nine the previous year) until it's hard not to get caught up and sing along.

If I have any complaint, it's that the five minute song would have been more effective cut down to three, but Hopkin's voice is easy enough on the ear not to irritate and the whole 'point' of the song is encapsulated in that recurring chorus, a sepia toned sadness given colour by the camaraderie of the present. Which means if listened to in the right company then it can't come 'round often enough.


* In a similar vein, I had great difficulties with Pink Floyd's 'Time' - "And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun". "How could anybody let ten years slip away?" I used to think? A fair enough comment when you're barely ten yourself but ah dear reader, my hubris is still biting my arse with a vengeance.

1968 The Beatles: Hey Jude

As the years have gone by, I've increasingly found that I have no middle ground with Sir Paul McCartney. Whereas I can feel good, bad or indifferent to the output of just about any other artist, the latter response is absent when considering McCartney's work; simply put, I either like it or I don't. And to continue along this bald statement path, I don't like 'Hey Jude'.

It's not always been that way - growing up, I always enjoyed the all together now football terrace chant of the close. But that was then; nowadays all I hear is that vocal and melody meandering from key to key in search of resolution but never managing to meet itself in a satisfying conclusion. And just when all concerned realise that it's probably never going to, another left field change of pace on the "better, Better, BETTER" puts its arm around the song and leads it into the "la la la" mantra of the outro that buries what's gone before like tarmac over grass.

The tale runs that, not keen on being bested by Richard Harris and 'Macarthur Park' as being the longest single, 'Hey Jude' purposely runs one second longer. But I think there's more to it than petty one-upmanship; 'Hey Jude' needs that 'chorus' to give a loose song about nothing much in particular a memorable send off, a hook to hum that otherwise just wouldn't be there and I think a useful comparator is with T Rex and 'Hot Love', another number one with an extended "la la la" ending.

But in the case of Bolan's song, that coda could have faded ten seconds in with no detriment to the song behind it - 'Hot Love' is a tight composition that can stand by itself. Not so 'Hey Jude' and to do the same here would see the song taking on the mantle of an unfinished demo searching for a reason for its own existence. And in that, 'Hey Jude' points toward the chinless wonders reliant on the reputation of their creator for their kudos that would characterise much of McCartney's eighties output.

1968 The Bee Gees: I've Gotta Get A Message To You

Though not apparent on first listen, 'I've Gotta Get A Message To You' is another death song in the same 'tradition' as 'Green Green Grass Of Home', this time sung from the point of view of a death row prisoner awaiting the chair and trying to get a last message to his wife (whose lover he murdered, hence his predicament). A contrived scenario for sure and one that demands a certain suspension of belief on the part of the listener to make it work, not least because of the broad brush work that paints it. Yet while I'm generally happy to play ball, 'I've Gotta Get A Message To You' lands too far beyond the pale for me to be taken in this time.

Ironically for a band who would later have a hit with a song called 'Tragedy', tragedy itself is something the Bee Gees were never at home with. Heartbreak yes, but 'I've Gotta Get A Message To You' is too clumsy in its execution to hit the nerve of empathy/sympathy it's aiming at. Like a surgeon wearing boxing gloves to operate, it crudely hacks out its story via the Gibb's over the top plead "I've just gotta get a message to you, hold on, hold on. One more hour and my life will be through" serving only to rub its blood in your face as the music goes about its own brash and brittle business of creating drama out of nothing. 'I've Gotta Get A Message To You' does its best, but there's a yawning chasm between intent and result that's never going to bridged with an emotional connection no matter how much hard core, hand wrung angst the band pour into it.

1968 The Beach Boys: Do It Again

"It's automatic when I talk with old friends. The conversation turns to girls we knew when their hair was soft and long and the beach was the place to go" - it seems odd that on 'Do It Again' the Beach Boys were indulging in wistful nostalgia that's all 'was' and 'when' barely two years on from their perfect statement of female desire that gave them those 'Good Vibrations'. But as even the casual fan knows, the late sixties had not been a happy ship for either band or their de-facto leader Brian Wilson as they turned away from the sun and surf that made their fortune into the introspection of 'Pet Sounds' and the grand yet flawed meisterwork that never was 'SMiLE'. "Don't fuck with the formula" warned Mike Love as the hits dried up.

From its title in, 'Do It Again' is a return to roots, a barer boned, surf styled recording that purposely harks to the slow build of 'California Girls' but with a self checking, self reverential lyric from Love that's happy to acknowledge that they'd been away too long. It's a move that falls in step with other major sixties stars who retreated to a more basic path after the comedown of psychedlia, but what was hip in 1963 isn't necessarily so in 1968 and few were calling out for a surf revival. Luckily, Wilson was at hand to lift it above mere retro retread by adding a metallic drum intro that squelches as it clangs and a close of hammering lifted from those 'SMiLE' sessions. Token gestures perhaps, but they succeed in raising 'Do It Again' above the formulaic statement that Love was loathe to fuck with. Its number one status may have proved him right in the short term, but as serviceable as it is, 'Do It Again' is a step backwards from what the band were capable of.

1968 The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown: Fire

I'm told that a picture paints a thousand words. Watching the 1968 'video' clip of Arthur Brown performing 'Fire' in warpaint and flaming headgear, I'm inclined to agree. Even with the sound off you can see the genesis of the New York Dolls, Kiss, Roy Wood, Alice Cooper and countless other/lesser rock acts who cottoned on to the notion that a strong, visual image can compensate immeasurably for a paucity in the 'good song bag'.

Turn the volume up, and the opening call to arms 'I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE AND I BRING YOU...FIRE' puts me in mind of Black Sabbath, Venom and the legion of corpse painted, church burning black metallers they inspired. Enough to send a small boy hiding behind a cushion in fright anyway, which is where my first glimpse of Mr Brown sent me. But then just when you think Arthur and the band have come to drag us all to hell, Vincent Crane's freakbeat organ fires (sorry) up to give the song wheels and suddenly it all gets a lot more cuddly.

I mentioned above about how Arthur's visual influence has been passed like a baton down the years, but that's not to say that he arrived like a clap of lightning from a clear blue sky. British music hall tradition is laced with acts reliant on mild freakshow overtones to sell their tickets, from George Chirgwin's black face minstrel with the falsetto voice to 'Little Tich' and his 28 inch shoes. But then contemporaneous with Brown, fellow Brit Screaming Lord Sutch was also fond of acting the goat by dressing up to add a grand Guignol appeal to whatever schlock he was peddling. Sutch, however, was the textbook definition of what my Gran would call a 'daft bugger', and scratch below the wild eyed fire demon front he presents and Arthur reveals himself to be fresh from the same gene pool.

Brown plays an effective bogeyman, but appearances are deceptive and 'Fire' is more mainstream than it would have you believe. Built entirely around that organ riff with brass overdubs (no guitars here), 'Fire' is psychedelia neutered by its inherent pop sensibilities. Stripped of Brown's vocal, 'Fire's steady drive seems more suited to soundtrack a car chase scene from some sixties thriller rather than a drug soaked freakout.

Stripped of its theatrics, 'Fire' manages to roll on its own internal rising momentum with sufficient force to keep the cheese at bay, but it's own prim neatness also keeps the excitement lid firmly shut - I don't know how useful the comparator is, but bootleg recordings of the 'Fire/Mrs O'Leary's Cow' elemental suite from Brian Wilson's aborted 1967 'SMiLE' sessions carry with them the wild and whirling unpredictability of a wall of flame to the point that you can imagine the disc itself breaking out in a sweat. By comparison, this 'Fire' simmers on a much lower flame on a Corgi registered gas hob. But that doesn't mean it's not all still great fun. Because it is.

1968 Tommy James & The Shondells: Mony Mony

A no nonsense, tubthump blast from the garage, 'Mony Mony' is more familiar to me through Billy Idol's 1987 cover. Yet despite his ever present sneer of lust, James outsings him ten to one with the throat rasping gusto of a proto Kurt Cobain that makes that "Here she comes now sayin' Mony Mony" sound like the most deviant of sexual mores. Should it come as any surprise that he's better? As a rule, the only way Billy Idol can improve on a song is by leaving it well alone, yet his dumb, nu-metal take highlights the weak link in this chain as being The Shondells themselves who play like they were briefed to play it bubblegum.

Lacking the fire of the vocals, the clap happy backing slightly hobbles James's best efforts and damp down his energy; James hollers the "so good, so fine", the band politely look the other way. 'Mony Mony' still thrills, but it lacks the edge of dirt and danger of a 'Louie Louie' or a 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' to be the bona fide teenage, garage grunge anthem it aspires to be.

1968 Des O'Connor: I Pretend

Along with Max Bygraves and Barry Manilow, Des O'Connor completed the trinity of easy targets beloved to British light entertainment comedians in the seventies and eighties. Their dogma was such that just typing their names causes me to smirk in pre-judgement without them having to so much as open their mouths. Ah but whatever the rights and wrongs of this, I'm not about to launch a re-appraisal of defence of any of them. I'll leave that for someone else. And anyway, in the case of Des and on the evidence of 'I Pretend', I couldn't if I wanted to.

It's the same old story, another lover has gone, but this time rather than try and win her back or hit the bottle in anguished heartbreak, Des is the archetypical polite Englishman, finding spineless virtue in not making a fuss ("Wish I knew exactly what I'd done. If there's someone else I'll set you free now, guess I've lost and he has won") and happy to queue 'till something better comes along as he sits in his chair and pretends she's still there with him. The fire of love does not exactly burn strongly in Mr O'Connor and he sings this with the personality and conviction of the speaking clock, a lo-fat 'ho-hum' of ambivalence suggestive of an innate boringness that could lie at the root of "exactly what" he's done to see her off - i.e. nothing, now or ever. "One day our love must end, till then I'll just pretend"; good luck with that Des, you big loser.

1968 The Equals: Baby Come Back

The unwary punter can buy a Platinum records CD from 1997 called 'The British 60's' that's a compilation of the 'best of' The Foundations and The Equals, equally split down the middle with ten songs from both bands.* Why were these two seen as suitable bedfellows I wonder? After all, there's no obvious common link between the music they produced; while The Foundations aped Motown with no small success, The Equals dabbled in the burgeoning reggae genre though neither styles were in any way 'British' enough to warrant that title. Unless the compliers considered that two home-grown, mixed race bands filtering a genre from abroad through very British roots was reason enough for the pairing? Maybe, and if so it's accurate (and imaginative) to a point the premise could provide this review all by itself.

All told, 'Baby Come Back' is a less successful stab at reggae than 'Baby Now That I've Found You' was at Motown. And that's because it keeps more of a toehold in straightforward pop than in its source material so that it's more accurate to regard 'Baby Come Back' as a straightforward pop tune given the odd reggae flourish. There's a light skank to the rhythm (that's emphasised by some "shh shh shh" 'Train To Skaville' vocal percussion at the close) true, and Eddie Grant's Guyana patois is as thick as it's genuine, but it's all overlaid with a typical British beat band beat that's only really interested in getting to the chorus.

This itself builds into itself quite neatly with the "Hey - all right" call and responses, but that doesn't disguise that 'Baby Come Back' is all chorus. Not usually a problem per se (though reggae was never about a good chorus), but in pulling two ways between styles the resulting paralysis and the flatness of the playing keeps 'Baby Come Back' on a continuous plateau that doesn't bear the level of repetition on display here. Good fun that that only just manages to outstay its welcome. Only just mind.


* Not that I'd recommend looking for a copy of this - its bargain basement price on the front derives from the 'song of this music has been re-recorded with as many of the original artists as possible' caveat in small print on the back. Honestly, this kind of carry on should come with a prominent 'ACHTUNG!' and a stencilled image of a grinning skull.

1968 The Rolling Stones: Jumpin' Jack Flash

On paper, it looks such a natural step from their previous number one - Jagger, no longer content to just 'Paint It, Black', now wants to take things to a logical conclusion by assuming blackness himself under the persona of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash'. In actual fact, what the stats DON'T reveal is the whole Sgt Pepper aping charade of 1967's 'Their Satanic Majesty's Request' , an album that saw the Stones dabble in cod psychedelia only to come off a poor second best. After such a serious misstep, points had to be proved and on 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' Jagger is in the mood to prove them.

Bill Wyman has since repeatedly claimed to have written, but recieved no credit for, the main riff here, but in truth it's always sounded a sawn off variation of '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' to me. And unlike that song, it's not the be all and end all power source of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' - from Brian's chunky acoustic intro, there's a loose and shambolic feel pervading the whole song from Charlie's off the beat drum beat to the droll drawl "it's a gas" backing vocals, a garage band jam barely holding it together yet with Jagger's yowling, ringmaster in a circus of horrors, daring it to fall apart as he recounts with ambivalence ("but it's alright now") the freakshow life endured by Mr Flash.

"I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag, I was schooled with a strap right across my back" - drawls Jagger, none of it true of course but by self mythologising his own character, both he and the band draw a line in the sand that's the equal of Robert Johnson meeting the devil at the crossroads - 'Satanic Majesty' was then, but now we're going to show how Satanic we can REALLY be. The later 'Sympathy For The Devil', 'Gimmie Shelter' and Midnight Rambler' would be the culminating explosions of this darker turn of face, but 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' lit the fuse and it fizzes quite superbly.