An admission – you won’t be surprised to learn that I don’t like rock and roll much. There are major exceptions (Jerry Lee!), and I’ve patiently sat and made myself appreciate a lot of it, but it doesn’t move me and neve[…]

Fuck all the kisses, they didn’t mean jack. But, of course, they did, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Humiliation is a rarity this high up the charts – when you find it, you find it tempered with sweetness; in this case […]

Sorry about that!
Newley’s second No.1 is a big step up from “Why?”, thanks mostly to a sympathetic Shadows-indebted backing which lets Newley sound flirtatious instead of just unctious. The lyrics don’t give him much wiggle-r[…]

This reputedly shifted a million copies, not an easy thing to do even when the singles market in Britain is booming. If you do manage it it’s down to one of two things – either you’ve united the British pop-buying market in approval[…]

These days dead rock stars leave back catalogues full of convenient foreshadowings and tragic – but marketable – hints. The Big Bopper’s posthumous contribution to the British pop charts, on the other hand, is a jovial rocker about […]

Faith’s second No.1 is a confident redux of his first. Style wins out entirely over content – “Poor Me” poses as a jilted man’s lament but is scored as a modernist celebration, all pops and jabs and rushes and sharp corn[…]

Hello Britpop. When I was a teenage Bowie fan all the biographies mentioned how David’s early vocal style was indebted to Anthony Newley’s, but I’d never heard of or heard Newley before and didn’t get round to tracking his stu[…]

A Fifties pop simp whose time was fast receding, Holliday’s second shot at glory is gloopy but pleasant. The lullaby pace brings out the best in Holliday’s slow and low croon, but really this song belongs to the doo-wop girls backing him […]

Pop music owes several debts to Caribbean emigrants who built their own sound systems out of frustration or fun. This is one of the smaller ones: Emile Ford’s vocation was sound engineering, the music was a lucrative side project. He didn&#8217[…]

I’ll state the obvious: British pop is rarely if ever cut from whole cloth. The template at a given time is generally American; the attitude and voice tailored to local sensibilities. The question of accent is central to UK pop’s hybrid i[…]