I was aware of this song long before I heard it – as a young boy it was quoted at me by my Dad should I ever object to tidying my room. Since my room was rarely tidy, I became very familiar with the central notion of “No Charge”. […]

“Fernando” is a breakthrough for ABBA, but a sly one. It’s different from anything else they’d tried – much more ambitious, with its long flowing melody lines in the verses and its lyrics about fighting in a liberation w[…]

I’ve argued before that there are no good songs about how lovely small children are: some counter-examples were raised in the comments box, but not many, and this surely wasn’t one of them. “Save Your Kisses For Me” is the kin[…]

I get the strong impression that whoever wrote this came up with the line “I love to love but my baby just wants to dance” and then wrote a lyric around it – which is fine, it’s a great line, but it leaves Tina Charles in the […]

Another one tainted slightly by personal memories: on the jukebox at University, this was a chosen singalong track of the rugby lads. I did not like the rugby lads; they did not like me – ergo I did not like the song. In fact when I first acqu[…]

Midge Ure is one of those pop figures who joins a bunch of dots, perhaps to a greater degree than his observed talent might suggest. From this boy band to New Pop to the charity records boom, via a tangential role (and almost much more than that, if […]

To swipe a phrase from my other favourite band, we are now into ABBA’s “imperial phase”, their shift from one-hit wonders to the world’s biggest pop group sudden and complete. The world had, in fact, been patient with ABBA &#8[…]

The first in what will be a regular run of reader participation features – one each time we reach the end of a year.
As you know, I give a mark out of 10 to each track. The rough expectation, over the course of 56+ years of #s, is that the numb[…]

There is a pub in North London called The Swimmer At The Grafton Arms. It prides itself on well-kept beer and a well-kept jukebox, the latter with an deeply tasteful selection of fine rock and soul music. I haven’t visited for a couple of years[…]

The Tammy Wynette original has one of those gimmicks so deathless that every songwriter in Nashville must have wished they’d hit on it first. Connolly’s parody skewers it without sneering at it, and a lot of the spelling-out fun is just c[…]