A record that anticipates, outdoes, and sadly fails to prevent Tom Jones, “Tower Of Strength” is the pop equivalent of those great, famous old Charles Atlas ads. Hey! Wimp! Fed up with having sand kicked in your face? Well, we can’t[…]

Maybe “His Latest Flame” is so endearing because Elvis is losing for once. Not that you’d know from the airy arrangement – or from the first verse, the song saving its unpleasant twist for a little while. It rests on a tweaked[…]

My problem with Helen Shapiro is the complete disconnect between her voice and her hit material. What do you do with a perky 15-year-old who sounds like a husky femme fatale? If it’s the 00s – or even maybe the late 60s – you can pa[…]

I can only assume the Great British Record Buying Public had had a collectively tough day. They got home, put their feet up, their coat on a hook, their cocoa by their side and their copy of “Michael” on the gramophone. And they were soot[…]

The title hints at exotica, and The Shadows’ instrumental fantasies are escapism of a kind, but the Kon-Tiki expedition wasn’t celebrating the mysteries of the Other, just solving them. Thor Heyerdahl’s exploits would have been fami[…]

John Barry obviously liked this – he lifted the twirling string intro for one Bond theme and the singer for several others. But after those first five seconds the song – another family-friendly export from the German hit factories –[…]

I can’t take any of Joe Meek’s futurist cred away, and I wouldn’t want to try. But with forty-years of hindsight it’s also obvious how bound some of his records are to the past. “Johnny Remember Me” comes at us, bo[…]

Polished as a pebble in a pocket, but there’s something about this I can’t warm to, a pall of drabness around it. Maybe it’s the arrangement, stately with prissy chirrups of strings. Maybe it’s Helen’s mopey sultriness: […]

The more you learn about Eden Kane, the more you’re convinced that his whole existence was the twinkling imaginings of some later sixties satirist. He’s simply too fruity to be true. For a start there’s the name – Eden Kane, s[…]

Another tense, riddling song – everything in the tune is pitching and yawing, rising and falling, the brothers howling and sea-tossed in the middle of it, spun around by a whirlpool whose name is woman. “Give me your heart, I’m your[…]