The first time I heard this – age 14 or so – I thought it was hilarious. My friend and I kept playing the opening seconds again and again. “I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE AND I BRING YOU -” brought up on massive 80s productions we e[…]

There’s more screamin’ and hollerin’ on “Mony Mony” than on any Number 1 of the last several years, to the point where Tommy James sounds really quite ill – separate “you…make me..feel…so..good…so goodâ[…]

The ever-smiling Des takes the Engelbert path, singing a sad song with an easy sweetness, drawing any sting it might have had, and reaching a bumper audience in the process. Thankfully O’Connor is much less bravura than Humperdinck, and his arr[…]

Towards the end of “Baby Come Back” the Equals start making “ch! ch! ch! ch!” noises in the background: it’s a nod to the way several ska tracks use the same sounds to add final momentum to a track, the ska train leaving[…]

There are vowelsounds here undreamed-of in prior pop: “hurricaayuhn”, “hahhhihg”, “doooouuwn”, the way Jagger gulps three times at “drowned”, more desperate each one. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash&#82[…]

Girls ‘turning out to be’ underage was doubtless a very real concern for your gigging rock star of the 60s and 70s, though I suspect a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy would be closer to the truth than Gary Puckett’s horrifie[…]

I went to a wedding at the weekend and this was their choice of first song. In that context, an occasion anyhow suffused with goodwill, it works fine. Otherwise, it’s too cloying for me – an overload of wide-eyed sincerity. Armstrong&#821[…]

Rare is the Eurovision winning country that doesn’t play safe on the follow-up. “Puppet On A String” had given Britain its first victory, and “Congratulations” keeps things unflinchingly upbeat. (It pulled in a very clos[…]

A snippy, impatient thing, “Lady Madonna” sounds compressed – not in the modern and technical sense, but everything in the song sounds like it’s squeezed in too tight, chafing against everything else like passengers stuffed on[…]

A little research on Dave Dee et al suggests they were a hard band to pin down – not a ‘manufactured’ group as we’d understand it now, but jobbing pop stars willing to turn a hand to whatever novelty their songwriters provided[…]