Death ballads aren’t really about the unfortunate who dies. Listen to Valance’s pallid, picky enunciation; listen to the way he caresses every detail – “he was the youngest driver there”; “as they pulled him from t[…]

Hot weather music: languid and evocative but also precise and unshowy, every note placed with minimum energy for maximum effect. The echo on the lead guitar does two things – it conjures a shimmer of desert heat, and it also emphasises the fing[…]

It began as a lad’s joke – one of the band saw a girl he fancied, “she gives me quivers in me membranes” he would tell the rest. It began as a riff and a baseline jabbed out in thirty minutes. It began as a B-Side. The marvel […]

Of all Cliff’s No.1s, “Please Don’t Tease” is the one where he tries hardest to be a ‘British Elvis’. Even Elvis at this point wasn’t really doing Elvis, and Cliff’s weedy glottals certainly don’t[…]

In the film The Hudsucker Proxy, the hero’s irritant and eventual nemesis is a guy called Buzz. Buzz is shrill, unshakably upbeat and entirely dumb; he is the living spirit of chirp. His traits include a glintful eye, a manic handshake and the […]

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 […]