Scrape the crust of legend off this record and you might be surprised, like I was, at how goofy it is. What did I know about this song? I knew that Jerry Lee was a hellraiser and married his cousin. And I knew the chorus, mostly from a 70s Edam adver[…]

Elder statesman of Caribbean music he may be but Belafonte is still best known in Britain for this and the “Banana Boat Song”. I’ll give a pass to most music at Christmas but this arrangement is too slow and syrupy to really enjoy, […]

The jangling intro and solos on “That’ll Be The Day” still sound gorgeous – assured and effortlessly pretty – but the rest of it hasn’t aged well. Liking Buddy Holly surely depends on liking that nervy gulping thin[…]

This one was a big favourite of my Dad’s, so my memory of it is half affectionate and half curdled: I remember trips north to see relatives with him singing lustily along and surly me in the back seat wanting to put my Smiths tapes on.
So it&#8[…]

Look! It’s Elvis!
The boogie-woogie piano forming this song’s undercarriage sounds so generic to me* that I get the best results from listening to it like a riddim, a bolt-on beat for Presley to freestyle over. Helpfully, that way of hear[…]

A double A-Side. “Style” is less obviously radical than “Cumberland Gap”; “Gamblin Man” if anything more so. Recorded in front of a whooping audience, “Gamblin’ Man” is sheer frenzy, a primitive h[…]

Snappy nudge-wink tune bizarrely and gratifyingly enlivened by the backing vocalists, who repeat – ahem – “Yip Yip we ‘pon the boom-ditty boom-ditty!” at every opportunity (and they have several). It would undermine a mo[…]

To someone like me who’s never much listened to Elvis, it’s once again remarkable how obvious and immediate his vocal influence was. Those short “-uh” breath-stops at the end of each line are all over “Butterfly”, […]

Guy’s fourth No.1 gives me a chance to apologise – I threw my hands up in horror at his first, “She Wears Red Feathers”, and gave it a two. I was wrong: “Red Feathers”, and Mitchell’s work in general, won me […]

“The first punk No.1” says Marcello. Yeah, I can see what he means. Lurching speed-freak skiffle played on Christ knows what which sounds nothing remotely like any previous chart-topper: if punk is anything, it might as well be that. I&#8[…]