The sixties canon-builders and nostalgia workers have strip-mined these charts, so when I come across a hit I’d never even heard of, I have to wonder why. As you’d expect the answer is often – “because it’s no good&#8221[…]

The beat boom tide has begun to recede, having changed root and branch the way music gets made, bought and taken seriously (as commerce, as art) in the UK. Its main players are changing their sound, its successors are plotting their various coups. At[…]

Like almost any break-up, “Ticket To Ride” flickers between sadness and anger. The sadness is tentative, the anger mixed with denial, and you could read the perky coda as acceptance if you like. It sounds to me, though, like a tacked-on &[…]

Recorded in Nashville with Billy Sherrill as producer and the Jordanaires on backing vocals – this has the pedigree, alright, but can Cliff handle the song? The answer has to be no. He plays it smooth and burnished, but comes across as smarmy: […]

A love that will outlast not just the works of man, but mountains and time itself – how is a spindly pop song expected to contain it? The guitars realise as much and their attractively sudden runs and spikes feel like breaks for freedom. The rh[…]

I’ve been trying to figure out why this doesn’t quite work for me. There’s a stiffness to it – the band don’t seem comfortable with this jaunty a sound. The riff’s a good one, full of bounce, but maybe not good eno[…]

Tom Jones is clearly well-meaning, approaches his music with unyielding gusto, and has surely done wonders for the gaiety of the nation. But frankly I can’t stand him. A comical background figure in the way that national treasures often are, I […]

Only the flimsiest of efforts made here to disguise the fact that “you” is shorthand for “Jesus”. “There’s a new world somewhere, they call the promised land” – and if that doesn’t tip you off, th[…]

Pure mood – a boy, an absence, a wait. There’s barely a context, only the most abstract of frames, all that really lingers is the melancholy chorus, and this gives the single a mystique that the better-known songs around it maybe lack. Be[…]

Size always matters: there are few surer-fire ways of creating a pop impact than by recording something which sounds bigger than whatever else is around. It might not win credibility (step forward, Meat Loaf) but it generally wins fans. But the momen[…]