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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Originally made popular by Harry Lauder, 'Two Little Boys' is a fable of childhood friendship carried over into adulthood where a past kind act of a boy is reciprocated in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.