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[…]

By way of contrast, Tab Hunter and his producers know their limitations precisely and the result is a modest, earnest and pleasant track. Alas for the MP3 age – I can’t gaze at the record sleeve and look into Tab’s dreamy eyes, what[…]

A lucky dip of styles, crazy-paved together by Frankie Vaughan’s beefy voice. A couple of years earlier this might have worked as a smartypants big-orchestra trifle. A few later and Vaughan could have turned it into an early soul thumper. As it[…]

“Singing The Blues” is an obvious smash – immediately memorable, modern enough to grab the rock’n’rollers, catchy and polite enough to hook everyone else too. The arrangements of these versions are very close (Mitchell&#[…]