An awful lot of comedy records have got to number one. Not many funny records have. This is one of them, as with every line the dreadfulness of this slush pile nightmare is more obvious. “It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few / I&#821[…]

“Strangers in the Night” has a theme – the chance wonder of meeting the right person – that I usually rather like. And you can see the outlines of a sweet song in Sinatra’s statesmanlike, somewhat bombastic reading. His […]

Mick Jagger sings “Paint It Black” from the point of view of a man whose lover has unexpectedly died. This happens in real life, of course: it has not happened to me, I hope it never does. But it’s happened to friends of mine, one v[…]

The girl in the song – a flash of colour in everyday guy-land – maps onto the flamingo metaphor itself, that odd flutter of inspiration in a heavy-handed song. The image of the flamingo-girl gives the song a hook and title but not a cente[…]

How to deal with a great voice? It’s a pleasant problem for an arranger, but a problem all the same. Nowadays the answer is often tied up in a wider question – how do you market a voice as great? For every imaginative answer there’s[…]

In grand pop tradition, the Spencer Davis Group’s follow-up to “Keep On Running” simply throws a few switches on that song. The lean R’n’B backbeat remains, and Steve Winwood’s vocal is just as assured and commited[…]

“Make It Easy On Yourself” was a selfish sulk from a big little boy, but this gloom is regal, a woe so deep and indulgent that it stops time and blacks the heavens out. Scott’s producers learn how to do Spector properly and their va[…]

Somewhere on my hard drive there’s a track which mashes this song into Girls Aloud’s “Sound Of The Underground”. Like a lot of bootlegs it works as an act of criticism as well as a song: “These Boots” is indeed the[…]

In an ideal universe the Beatles would be hugely generous to people wanting to sample their songs and deeply harsh on people wanting to cover them. The Overlanders obviously felt that this featherweight tale of chatting up an exchange student would b[…]

About the only thing in this compact, well-tailored song that I don’t like are the occasional whoops and cries in the background. Everything else is precisely right: what’s so impressive about this record is how finely balanced its elemen[…]