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.