UK Charts: 1963-1966

1963

Elvis had made a few records on a similar template through ’62, of which “Return To Sender” may be the best with a bouncing horn line and some very subtle Everly-influenced guitar way down in the mix. The Shadows were still out there doing their thing, with “Dance On!” reaching #1 at the end of January ’63 with a dense and heavy mix. It was quickly followed by “Diamonds”from their old bassist Jet Harris (who departed the band in April ‘62), taking the #1 slot in February.

And then “Please Please Me” gets released. I complain that “Love Me Do” was a bit derivative even in its era, but you absolutely cannot level that criticism at the Beatles’ follow-up. “Please Please Me” is an electrifying record, and while the production might be a little wayward with some rather awkward fades here and there, you can’t deny the sheer energy of the thing. Besides which, the Beatles had managed to get in all the subtle complexity of an Everlys record using nothing but guitar, bass, drums and a harmonica.

All that and they were still beaten to #1 by Frank Ifield. “Wayward Wind” hit that spot at the end of February, “Please Please Me” sitting underneath it at #2. The former is an entirely competent post-Everly record, although for me there’s something about each of Ifield’s vocal performances that grates. Still, it was way more typical of early ’63, and you only need to listen to Bobby Vee’s “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes” (#3 March ’63) or Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” (22 weeks on chart from March ’63, culminating in #6 in May) to confirm this.

When I first mentioned the Shadows, I also mentioned they’d inspired a thousand small beat groups. With the band having been going strong for nearly three years as an independent unit, and still having #1s both with Cliff Richard (“Summer Holiday”) and without (“Foot Tapper”), you might get to wondering whether this is an idle assertion.

Well, while it took the Shadows to inspire those bands, it took the Beatles to unlock the pop charts for them. Although they were yet to have a #1, the Fab Four had established that despite the sophistication and maturity of pop circa ’63, there was a market for beat groups. One of the first to join the Beatles also emerged from a similar Liverpool-via-Hamburg background; Gerry & The Pacemakers took their debut “How Do You Do It?” to #1 in April ’63. Buddy Holly’s posthumous #3 “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” underlined that there was an audience for guitar groups.

In fact, pop circa ’63 showed there were audiences for a lot of things. Ray Charles’ unabashed bashing away at the Template turned out to be prescient: May saw country crossover hits for Brenda Lee with “Losing You” and Skeeter Davis with “The End of the World”. That latter one’s a great record. The harmonies, the barest hint of steel guitar in the background; it all fits together so well. Andy Williams’ “Can’t Get Used To Losing You” comes from a similar root but you can hear he’s already branching off to the possibility of new territory.

Speaking of new sounds, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons definitely have something there on “Walk Like A Man”, a #12 from May ’63. Early soul hadn’t really troubled the charts to this point, but this and records like The Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” show that doo-wop was beginning to evolve into something else. If that "doo-lang" melody and those chord progressions sound familiar, hold that thought. We'll be coming back here later.

But we’d decided who we really wanted to be stars in ’63. The Beatles finally beat Frank Ifield, and “From Me To You” gave them their first #1 in May. It’s a less exciting single than “Please Please Me”, but that doesn’t matter. Beat groups were now a thing. Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas took Lennon-McCartney penned “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” to #2 in June ’63, Freddie & The Dreamers’ “If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody” was right underneath it, and the next #1 to come along was “I Like It” from Gerry & The Pacemakers.

Their influencers did well out of the beat boom, too. Jet Harris had a #2 with “Scarlett O’Hara”, while the Shadows had their go at the #2 spot with “Atlantis”. In what’s perhaps a nod to the sudden surge of the beat groups, “Atlantis” was one of the easiest of their records to mimic since “Apache” and “F.B.I.” way back at the start of the decade.

Ray Charles returned to reap the benefits of country crossover’s popularity with “Take These Chains From My Heart”, a #5 in June; this is definitely more crossover than Template, with even a little bit of jazz piano adding some extra interest. Meanwhile, Roy Orbison made the case for him being a one man genre with “Falling”.

Manchester band The Hollies made their mark on the beat group scene with “(Ain’t That) Just Like Me” although the Coasters cover only went to #25. The Searchers had more luck with cover versions (this time of a Drifters song); “Sweets for my Sweet” went all the way to #1 in August ’63. The Searchers were from Liverpool and had originally been a skiffle group, which was the kind of background you wanted with the Beatles ascendant.

The beat group had finally arrived on the scene. But 1963 was only just getting going.

Since beginning to write this series, I’ve found myself looking at Elvis in a new way: as a reflector of what was going on in pop. When rock’n’roll was frantic and wild, he was the most frantic and wild. When it slowed down, Elvis slowed down. When it looked like rock’n’roll was a bust and the Template would take back over, Elvis adopted the Template. When it didn’t, he became a bit of an Everlys copyist.

With beat groups and Beatles on the rise, Elvis entered another of his wild phases on “Devil In Disguise” (#1 August ‘63). John Lennon pronounced Elvis a relic of the past — “like Bing Crosby now” — but I can’t help but think the old hip-swiveller paid a lot of attention to what was going on. “Devil In Disguise” sounds an awful lot more current that Billy Fury’s “In Summer”.

Beat groups continued to put in a good showing. Brian Poole & The Tremeloes released “Twist And Shout”, going to #4 in August. (The Beatles had a far better take on their album, just before John Lennon’s voice gave out completely from the exhausting recording session.) Even old bands were getting in on the act: Johnny Kidd & The Pirates came up with “I’ll Never Get Over You”, a #4 in September.

However, they weren’t dominating the scene. Phil Spector went all-out with the wall of sound on “Da Doo Ron Ron”, this one credited to The Crystals and recorded by them. It was #5 in July. Slightly less an assault of sheer volume was Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party”, produced by Quincy Jones. Still, both proved there was space for a slicker and more overtly produced pop sound.

At the other extreme, a little band called The Rolling Stones released “Come On”, a minor hit from August which the band seemed to have rushed through at Olympic Studios. It was primitive and wore its blues influences much more strongly than the other beat groups, opening the pop world to rawer blues records.

Then there was surf. Unlike many of pop’s genres, surf arrived pretty much fully formed, with its most iconic hit “Wipe Out” by the Surfaris also being the first on the British charts, coming out at the end of July ’63 and hitting #5 in September. It’s a similar story with Jan & Dean’s “Surf City”: surf didn’t build up slowly, it powerslid into the charts with surfboards on the roof, ready to party.

Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas added to their roster of Lennon-McCartney penned #1 singles with “Bad To Me” in August. Freddie & The Dreamers had a #2 hit with “I’m Telling You Now”, diminutive frontman Freddie Garrity and his bandmates hailing from Manchester but adopting the Merseybeat sound.

Of all the artists Joe Meek worked with, the one he really wanted to have a hit was Heinz. Unfortunately audiences never took to the German-born singer, and would arrive at shows armed with cans of beans to throw over him. Floor-stomping tribute record “Just Like Eddie” entered the charts in August ’63 and dragged its way to #5 in October, but Meek could and had done better with other artists, and that he spent most of his money getting there made the #5 position somewhat less impressive.

If the Beatles’ first three singles launched the Beatles, it was their fourth which launched Beatlemania. “She Loves You” went to #1 within a fortnight of its early September release, and spent 29 weeks in the charts. This is the one you always see on documentaries, barely heard above stadiums full of screaming fans. It was finally displaced from the #1 spot by Brian Poole & The Tremeloes’ “Do You Love Me?” a manic single that borrows from “Twist and Shout” and even finds a little time for the old 1962 tactic of name-checking dances.

Trini Lopez’ cover of “If I Had A Hammer” is almost as mad, and went to #4 in mid-October.

Set against these, the production on “Then He Kissed Me” by The Crystals sounds in an altogether different and more luxurious class. Phil Spector produced records to be listened to on car radios and portable record players like the Dansette Bermuda; fidelity didn’t matter so much as being able to fill the room with sound.

Cliff Richard had a surprisingly decent cover of "It's All In The Game", entering the chart at the end of August '63 and going to #2 in September. It's soft and slow, and while you might recognise the strings from "Young Ones" the piano accents feel more like Nashville. That said, the last minute does start to drag a bit with it not really going anywhere.

Nothing was quite so slick as Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou” (#3 November ‘63). This is a properly luxurious record. You can trace many of the elements back to the old travel records of the ’50s, but it would be rare to hear a record of this complexity back then. It’s a similar story on Shirley Bassey’s “I (Who Have Nothing)”, a #6 at the tail end of October. It might hark back, but this would have blown people’s minds in ’55. I think the biggest difference is when you get down deep into the songs and check out the rhythm section; there’s no old reliable donkey to be found here.

The influence of the Beatles continued to spread. Adam Faith’s “The First Time” has clearly been leaning over and copying Lennon’s homework. A worthwhile endeavour, as it was #5 in October. The Searchers had a November #2 with more of the same sound in “Sugar and Spice”.

It would be reasonable to expect pop to schism (as it would later do along the punk/disco axis) into “high production” pop and the “low production” output of the beat groups. The former certainly put in a strong argument for its case: Phil Spector created one of the most famous intros ever on The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”, and attached it to a pretty much flawless record. It’s the pop archetype: ridiculously simple love song lyrics carried along by the lushest production the technology of the age will allow.

However, that didn’t happen. Almost immediately, the lines started to blur between the two. Gerry & The Pacemakers were a beat group, but “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is high-gloss pop of the finest order. It almost never came to be, given the band had started out intending to record a Beatles cover. Going for the old Rodgers and Hammerstein showtune turned out to be a wise decision, as their third single also gave the group their third #1 in November, setting a record for consecutive #1s by a debut.

Conspicuously absent from the UK singles chart in ’63 is Bob Dylan, the young folk artist who’d taken New York’s Greenwich Village scene by storm. Instead we got a version of “Blowin’ In The Wind” recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, a folk group on the same scene with similar Woody Guthrie influences. It’s a far softer cut than Dylan’s. I remember them using this in school along with “Streets of London” to teach us about protest songs. Unfortunately, the main thing I learnt was the idea of cover versions and folk’s extensive library of them, after getting home and asking my parents to find the exact version of the song I’d been played at school. Well, it was an enjoyable hour or so at least.

Of course, if you wanted a raucous single, the Rolling Stones would happily oblige. “I Wanna Be Your Man” makes even the rowdiest beat group single sound like a laid-back, polished affair with screaming garage rock guitars, an unrelenting beat, a wandering bassline performed at breakneck pace and singing that makes one wonder as to the state of Mick Jagger’s throat after this take. It was originally to be a Beatles number, but Lennon and McCartney thought the Stones made a cracking job of it.

With all the singles in this period harking back to earlier charts, it’s no surprise to find something making a fair crack at “Here In My Heart”. The first twenty seconds of Kathy Kirby’s “Secret Love” is a more than passable Al Martino impersonation, but it’s a fake-out: it all falls away to a bouncy country-tinged single. Another British artist in a similar vein was Dusty Springfield: “I Only Want To Be With You” entered the charts in December and eventually hit #4. It may be just me, but I reckon there’s some Phil Spector influence in those swelling strings.

It certainly makes The Hollies’ “Stay” sound more down the Stones end of the spectrum. It may be of the moment, and sold respectably enough (15 weeks in the chart from December ’63, peaking at #8), but does it really add anything to the Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs version other than manic energy? Not really.

But as we’d heard from Elvis, manic energy was back in. This was the Beatles’ year. And who better to play it out, than the boys themselves? “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was a well-deserved December #1. It’s unabashedly basic by modern standards, and even arguably by the standards of the time, but listen carefully and there’s some lovely little guitar and bass detail in there. It begs the question: would the Beatles be as revolutionary in 1964 as they were in ‘63?

1964

The early years of the ’60s were an antidote to the plodding Template years and fumbling missteps of rock’n’roll and skiffle that preceded them. Formerly barren charts overflowed with ideas. “I Want To Hold Your Hand” shared chart space with not only Beatles copyists like The Swinging Blue Jeans’ “The Hippy Hippy Shake”, but also country-inspired hits like Gene Pitney’s “Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa” and out and out high-production pop like The Ronettes’ “Baby, I Love You”.

The producer was becoming a key part of pop. Could you imagine “Telstar” without Joe Meek? “Da Doo Ron Ron” without Phil Spector? Incidentally, Meek hated Spector and always suspected the latter of copying his ideas, an impression probably not helped by Spector’s reign coinciding with one of Meek’s barren periods. They were at opposite ends of the spectrum, though. Meek’s RGM Sound concentrated on making each new record sound different. Spector, on the other hand, applied a consistent signature to all of his Philles output. The records were suitably different, but you knew in an instant they all came from the same place.

The idea of a pop factory with a regular roster of artists had originated with Goffin/King, Sedaka and their associated artists working in and around the Brill Building, but it was Phil Spector who elevated it to an art. The Brill Building made good hits, but anybody else could have made them. Philles was a hit factory, and nobody else could make records anything like it. (Berry Gordy’s Motown was a similar concept — the Motown sound is another instantly recognisable one.)

Of course, nobody else needed to. There was plenty of space in the charts for a bunch of lads with guitars: “Needles And Pins” gave The Searchers a #1 in February, breaking Gerry & The Pacemakers’ impressive streak by keeping “I’m The One” down at #2. Admittedly, the latter record was a bit of a come-down after “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.

Backward-looking pop was rapidly gaining a niche, too. Dublin band The Bachelors had a #1 with “Diane”, which takes a little bit of Orbison, a little bit of late ’50s Everlys, the tiniest sliver of doo-wop, and ends up sounding both of its time and not of it at the same time.

To some extent, this was an extreme example of the softening process the beat group scene was going through. Sure, you still had rave-ups with early Beatles energy such as “5–4–3–2–1” by Manfred Mann, a #5 in February ’64. However, the Merseybeats entered the chart in the same week with “I Think Of You”, and that’s a far softer affair with some guitar picking during the verses that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Everlys record. Ditto Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas on “Little Children”, a conscious attempt to record something other than a Lennon-McCartney number.

Even the Stones dialled it down on “Not Fade Away”, their first single to be recorded at Regent Sound Studios on Denmark Street. It’s now a music shop —  I bought a guitar case there a few years ago  — but back in the day you’d have found the Stones giving it their all in front of a two track tape recorder in a room coated with egg boxes while the neighbours banged in vain against the wall.

In a similar vein to Dusty Springfield was Cilla Black, whose “Anyone Who Had A Heart” was #1 in March ’64. It was actually a Dionne Warwick hit in most other countries, but as ever we had a soft spot for anything we’d made at home. I’ll admit though that with “I Only Want To Be With You” still in recent memory, my heart would have belonged to Dusty.

Speaking of country tinged pop, country itself maintained its low-key foothold in the British charts. Jim Reeves’ “I Love You Because” may have “only” peaked at #5, but it spent an incredible 37 weeks in the charts, making it one of the biggest records of the year. If such a feat made you pine for “I Believe” then the Bachelors had your back. Their cover version wasn’t quite the stalwart that Laine’s was, but it still made it to #5 in May ‘64.

Pastiches of the past sold better than the real past. The Shadows may have played a big part in kickstarting the beat group phenomenon, and released some of the great records of the decade along the way, but in a post-Beatles world they were old-hat. “Theme For Young Lovers” is a rather melancholy record, and while #12 may have been respectable enough it was a far cry from the days of “Wonderful Land”.

This is one of the oddities of pop. When genres rise, their records sound confident. They might not all be happy songs, but they make their statements boldly and with gusto. “Telstar” never once sounded like it didn’t think it was supposed to be there. By contrast, records in the declining phase of a genre hunch their shoulders and look at the floor. They don’t make confident statements; they apologise for being there at all. Lovely as it is, “Theme For Young Lovers” is one of the latter.

If you want a contemporary example of the former circa April ’64, it would be hard to best “My Boy Lollipop” by Millie Small. Two notes in and you know this is a record that’s not just confident, it’s got sass. As if the pop charts didn’t have enough ideas, this one introduced us to the joys of Island Records, ska, and Jamaican recording artists. And all for the price of a 45 rpm single. No wonder it went to #2.

It was kept off the top slot by The Four Pennies with “Juliet”, although one week the other way and that would have been The Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” instead.

But I was making a point about confidence. It’s easy to do on a happy record, but you know pop is ascendant when you get a confident sad record. Dionne Warwick’s “Walk On By”, a #9 in May ’64, is a prime example. Just because you’re playing minor chords doesn’t mean you can’t play ’em like you mean ’em. Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over” is another great one. Just when you think Orbison’s hit the biggest note he’s going to hit, he comes back with one final, “It’s Over” to end the record.

With the Philles hit factory at peak output, it was time for the Motown one to make an impression on the UK. “My Guy” was a #5 for Mary Wells, and gave us a new hit factory sound. Motown is all about a super-tight rhythm section that sticks rigidly to its groove, bold horns and those unmistakable intros. (Which the band figured out by happy accident!)

Confidence aside, the other sign of a dying genre is when it turns to novelty in order to shift inventory. I could make that excuse for Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place To Go” hitting #3 in June ’64, but it’s so late for a rock’n’roll record even that doesn’t seem the right reason; this was sharing chart space with “Don’t Throw Your Love Away” by the Searchers. Did we feel collectively guilty for not buying “School Days”, given this is the same song with different lyrics?

Whatever, it highlighted the problem that had ultimately killed off rock’n’roll in the late ’50s: it never evolved. It had taken the Everlys and then the quest for the new of the early ’60s to show that pop had to keep moving if it wanted to outmaneuver the Template and our enduring love of novelty songs. The maturing beat group scene was no exception. The Stones might have made a case for going even rawer than the Beatles, but it was the Animals who twisted this into yet another form.

“Baby Let Me Take You Home” was a statement of intent from April, but had a relatively uninspiring chart performance. Still, the public were ready for a bit of rhythm and blues in their music, with even the Shadows coming back from their doldrums on R&B instrumental “The Rise and Fall of Flingel Bunt”. When Animals guitarist Hilton Valentine picked up a Gretsch Tennessean and laid down the world’s most famous Am-C-D-F-Am-Em7 progression on “House Of The Rising Sun” it couldn’t have gone anywhere but #1, which it duly did in July.

It was followed the week later by the Rolling Stones with chart-topper “It’s All Over Now”; no longer content with making the biggest and the noisiest noise, they too were pushing the beat group boundaries firmly into R&B territory. This set the scene for the ’60s pop tribes — the Beatles had become the establishment act, safe enough for families that they were invited to the Royal Variety Performance. If you wanted angular, antagonistic music that your parents didn’t like, you gravitated to the Stones or the Animals. If they weren’t enough, then you started following the Pretty Things, a band who seemed to exist mostly for newspapers to write outraged columns about.

This becomes obvious when you listen to “A Hard Day’s Night” in the context of these records. The Beatles had shaken things up the previous year, but in this company it’s got one good chord and a few nice ideas that don’t get paid enough attention. There’s actually a better record in the final few seconds of outro than the rest of it. (Seriously, listen to the last ten seconds and tell me that wouldn’t make the basis of a great single!)

It was huge, it was a #1, it had a great comedic film to go with it, but you’d only think it was new and exciting if your parents didn’t let you listen to the Stones. I spent years thinking “House Of The Rising Sun” was released in ’65 because it sounds at least a year newer than this. I know this is a hopelessly controversial minority opinion, but I genuinely believe the Beatles spent a surprising amount of time behind the curve, and people only think otherwise because their parents wouldn’t let them buy the cool records at the time.

But then they had released three albums in 18 months and written a pile of songs for others, Stones included. And we’re only halfway through 1964. There’s a chance they might still have something much more interesting up their collective sleeves.

The Everly Brothers never stood still. Even when they were languishing in the charts at #22, firmly part of an old generation of pop, they never gave up on making new sounds, trying new things. “The Ferris Wheel” from July ’64 is a moody, seductive single that takes the sound of the Animals and the Stones in its stride.

That collision between R&B and the beat group scene was the contemporary sound in ’64. In August you had “Tobacco Road” by the Nashville Teens at #6, which wore its blues proudly. #1 was Manfred Mann’s “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”, a single that could comfortably sit next to your Stones records.

Not everyone was happy with this state of affairs. Joe Meek called it “matchbox music” and viewed the Beatles as little more than copyists. Nevertheless, even he was willing to admit the public weren’t going to buy Heinz records and teamed up with The Honeycombs to record the storming “Have I The Right” at 304 Holloway Road.

Honey Lantree’s drumming was augmented by the classic Meek tactic of recording people stomping in the stairwell, along with someone banging a tambourine against the microphone for the final bit of extra force. It’s as endearingly homemade as anything that ever came out of RGM Sound, but that didn’t stop it from taking the #1 spot in September.

It was surrounded by singles of equal quality, most of them somewhat more well remembered today than the Honeycombs. With the Stones abandoning their effort to be the noisiest noise (and starting their own songwriting with efforts like “As Tears Go By”, a #9 for Marianne Faithfull in September), the Kinks stepped up to the challenge with “You Really Got Me” (#1 September ‘64). The Zombies gave us dark, electric piano-driven “She’s Not There”, #12 at the same point. Surf ambassadors the Beach Boys were at #7 with “I Get Around”.

This is the ’60s narrative we know and have heard countless times through best-song-ever lists, film soundtracks and somewhat rose-tinted recollections. So I’d like to draw your attention to a mere #31 from August ’64. “Happiness” by Ken Dodd is the music hall updated for the mid-’60s age. It’s a bit more lively and better produced than all those ’50s music hall records, but the lineage is plain to see.

Even the Template was still sounding distant echoes: I wouldn’t say Julie Rogers’ “The Wedding” is an out and out Template record, but it’s certainly on familiar enough terms to nip round and borrow the sugar. Go back and listen to “Here In My Heart” — there’s been some evolution over the last twelve years, but the ancestry is obvious. The Bachelors’ “I Wouldn’t Trade You For The World” (#4 September ’64) is a little further on influence-wise, but we’re still talking Everly Brothers circa ’58 in terms of sound.

Still, pop as a whole kept moving on even if parts of it stuck their flag firmly in the past. Herman’s Hermits were a Manchester band produced by Mickie Most (who was also the man behind the Animals), and they were perhaps the first to fold surf’s fully-formed sound back into the archetype of the beat group. Or at least, the first to be successful in doing so: their take on Goffin/King composition “I’m Into Something Good” was #1 at the end of September.

Just below it at #2 was “Rag Doll” by Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons. I stand by my assertion that nobody else could make a Philles record, but this a damn good crack at it, “Be My Baby”-aping bridge at two minutes in and all. But if you want an illustration at the difference between that and the genuine output of a hit factory, stick on “Where Did Our Love Go”. Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson and Diana Ross together made up the Supremes, and had the backing of Motown’s best writers and production team, an outfit called Holland-Dozier-Holland. The result is you’re comparing a mere great song to a great song with not a single note out of place. I swear half of Motown’s records being so immediately identifiable is that their band was so damn tight.

1964’s run of fantastic #1 singles continued with Roy Orbison and “Oh, Pretty Woman” in October. It’s the quintessential Orbison record; a little at odds with then-current trends, but an undeniable piece of craftsmanship and absolutely made by Roy’s turn on the microphone, little growl and all. Supposedly it took four guitarists to record, although they did come up with one of pop’s most famous riffs in the process so it was worth the effort.

The Template continued to evolve, to the point that it was spawning its own genre. Matt Monro was a prime example of this evolved-Template movement; by the mid-’60s “Walk Away” (#4 November ’64) was one of many songs gaining popularity under the label “easy listening” — associated with the high fidelity FM radio stations in the US, and deliberately avoiding the need to challenge boundaries like the brattish offspring of the Stones and Beatles. (You might stick The Searchers’ “When You Walk in the Room” on your Dansette and dance to it, but you wouldn’t exactly use it to show off the fidelity of your stereo hi-fi or let it recede to background musical wallpaper.)

The rise of easy listening as a conscious eschewing of what had happened to pop since 1960 gave these records a legitimacy that got people out and buying singles. You’d seen Template and Template-like records crop up every once in a while, but from ’64 easy listening started producing big hits: none more exemplary than Sandie Shaw’s “(There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me”, for the Bacharach/David writing credit on the label as much as its #1 position at the end of October ‘64.

Interestingly, while I’d put it as part of the easy listening canon, there’s not a huge amount of Template in it other than vestigial traces. Instead, it’s more like pop from an alternative universe where the mad rush for new sounds in ’61–63 built on the “Here In My Heart” tradition rather than making a deliberate break with it. This is why I put the birth of easy listening as a distinct genre so late. It took until ’64 for us to get a record that acknowledged the Template had existed but did more than merely copy it with minor updates.

While easy listening may have described a plausible alternate universe, here in the real one pop had largely evolved in two very distinct streams: from rock’n’roll via beat groups with R&B influences, and from songwriters and the Brill Building to the contemporary hit factory. November ’64 gave examples of both: Manfred Mann’s “Sha La La” at #3, and the Supreme’s “Baby Love” at #1.

We even had our own go at replicating the Holland-Dozier-Holland sound on our rainy little island with Petula Clark’s “Downtown”, although it’s hard to imagine Motown having the ink barely dry on the lyrics at the point recording starts as was the case here. What’s odd about this record is that previous singles by Petula Clark had been firmly in the category of ’50s-style records for older buyers, but even with easy listening becoming a force in its own right composer Tony Hatch decided to pitch at the younger pop audience. It was a worthwhile gamble: the record went to #2 in December ’64, and could have been #1 had it not been for another record released at the same time which I’ll get to in a moment.

Another #2 (this one from November) was “All Day and All of the Night” by The Kinks. Brothers Ray and Dave Davies seemed to have taken criticism of the Beatles and Stones as just a bunch of noise, and turned it into a mission statement; it resulted in some tense standoffs with their record company Pye, but Ray Davies slicing up his amplifier with a razor blade and insisting that “You Really Got Me” be recorded as a mean, scuzzy slice of fuzz broke a string of failed singles and established the sound of the early Kinks.

If the Bachelors had been directly responsible for recording a string of ’50s soundalikes, they were also indirectly responsible for reviving the death disc. Member Dec Cluskey was dating a Surrey girl who’d been given the nickname “Twinkle” by her family, and got her into a studio with a bunch of session musicians (among them a young Jimmy Page) to record “Terry”. It was an old concept, but a thoroughly modern sounding record. It was closely followed by the Shangri-Las with “Leader Of The Pack”, a so-bad-it’s-good record that makes me wonder if anyone ever got royalties for revving their motorcycle in front of a microphone.

All of that in just six months made “Can’t Buy Me Love” very dated indeed when compared to a Stonesesque rave-up like The Pretty Things’ “Don’t Bring Me Down”. Which makes it a good thing that “I Feel Fine” dispels any notion the Beatles are going to fade into history as just another beat group within its first few seconds, a cutting knife edge of found-sound guitar feedback leading into an R&B-influenced riff that’s right up to the minute. It displaced the Rolling Stones’ “Little Red Rooster” from #1 in December, the Beatles finally catching up with the sound of ’64 and heading right past it in a single leap — showing that they, like the Everlys before them, weren’t going to stand still.

1965

Something to remember about the 1960s was that pop was defined as much by the availability of records as tastes. I might not have had Spotify or Napster in the ’90s, but for ’60s record buyers it wasn’t even guaranteed that a hit single would get a UK release. As a result, the British charts are littered with oddities: while the Four Tops were in the US charts, our version of “Baby I Need Your Loving” came from a band called The Fourmost, whose cover was impressive for its soundalike credentials.

Part of this is what helped sustain acts like the Stones; old blues records were such rare treasures that finding them inspired the kind of devotion that made people start bands. If you liked that sound and didn’t have the time to scour record shops then you went out and bought Stones records. One of the major reasons the Beatles were able to innovate was that as global stars, they had access to records and music makers that a little beat group roaming around the UK in a rusty Commer van could only dream of.

Perhaps this joy of discovery is what made Denny Laine tell the rest of his band they needed to record a cover of Bessie Banks’ “Go Now” the first time he heard it. “Go Now” gave The Moody Blues their first #1 in February ’65, as well as giving someone’s poor piano one hell of a workout. Also in the covers game were The Searchers, who cut their own version of nuclear protest song “What Have They Done to the Rain?” (#13 January ‘65). I think it’s one of their most underrated moments.

Easy listening continued to find its feet. Sandie Shaw’s “Girl Don’t Come” was #3 at the end of January. Georgie Fame had a #1 crossing the nascent genre with jazz on “Yeh, Yeh”. Even established beat acts like Gerry & The Pacemakers were having a crack at this softer sound (“Ferry Cross The Mersey”) although I’m not sure their listening was quite so easy as, say, Matt Monro’s. Maybe Manfred Mann’s “Come Tomorrow” (#4 February ’65) is a better example of this kind of cross-pollination.

But the greatest crossover was yet to come. “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” took the blue-eyed soul of the Righteous Brothers, got Phil Spector to slather on the kind of rich production those early easy listening records enjoyed, and got a group of session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew to record it. It’s a masterpiece. Spector had each verse sung dozens of times before he was happy with it. And yet… here in Britain, we nearly had another Fourmost moment and at one point it looked like Cilla Black’s cover would have beaten it.

Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham was so incensed he took out a full page not-for-profit ad in the Melody Maker telling people to buy the better song. He did have rather a point. A run of the mill easy listening record against one of the greatest hits ever recorded. Luckily, sense eventually prevailed: The Righteous Brothers were #1 in February, with Cilla at #2.

They were eventually displaced in March by The Seekers with “I’ll Never Find Another You”, a folkish arrangement from the Australian four-piece and quite prescient of both a trend for folk influences in ’65 and also the sound of 1967 band Eclection (who I’m not supposed to tell you about, because they never made the charts).

If all that listening was too easy, and folk wasn’t your thing, then Northern Ireland’s Them picked up the hard-edged R&B baton with “Baby Please Don’t Go”, Van Morrison snarling and yelping his way through the old blues standard on vocals. Wayne Fontana’s “The Game Of Love” was only slightly more civilised. Eric Burdon also put in a raw vocal performance on “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, the Animals giving their Vox Continental organ a hard time —listen carefully and you can hear it wobble out of tune on the big notes!

But early ’65 was easy listening’s time in the sun, and in mid-March it had its next huge #1, Tom Jones thanking pirate radio airplay for making “It’s Not Unusual” a big international hit. (The previous year Jones had recorded several demos for Joe Meek as part of a Welsh beat group, but nothing had come of this, other than leaving us with another bizarre alternate pop universe to think about).

Folk influences continued to leach into the pop world. Marianne Faithfull’s “Come And Stay With Me” (#4 April ’65) is possibly the first genuine baroque pop hit (if you assume “English Country Garden” was just using a harpsichord for laughs) and the vocal further presages the band I’m not allowed to tell you about. In hindsight, it was a record quite ahead of its time (compare with Herman’s Hermits #3 “Silhouettes”).

The R&B bandwagon kept growing as well. The Who cut their own two minutes of punchy, fast-paced noise in “I Can’t Explain” (#8 April ‘65), featuring backing vocals from The Ivy League whose “Funny How Love Can Be” had been another #8 the previous month. Of course the band at the wheel of said wagon were the Stones, and “The Last Time” was naturally #1 in March.

Thing is, all these new groups on the bandwagon and all these attempts to push R&B into new territory started to upset the purists who thought that those lucky enough to get hold of blues records should be making slavish reproductions of the source material rather than making brattish pop songs with it. Thus it was that when The Yardbirds had a #3 in April with “For Your Love”, guitarist Eric Clapton quit the band for being too fun. (He did at least recommend Jimmy Page as a replacement). It’s also notable for being yet another ’65 record to have a harpsichord on it.

Clapton’s muso strop was rather at odds with the spirit of the time. Them could barely play their instruments —  there’s a great video of the band hacking their way through “Here Comes The Night” at an NME show out of tune and out of sync with each other —  but that didn’t stop it being a #2 hit or a fantastic pop record. I’d certainly rather listen to this than a lecture from Eric about how it isn’t faithful enough to its influences. Besides, it’s like “Apache”: there’s something inspiring in the feeling that if you sit down with a guitar and a spare evening you can probably learn how to play this. (Personally tested. You totally can.)

As through much of the early ’60s, country could still provide the odd hit. Frequent chart visitor Jim Reeves had “Not Until The Next Time”, but the big #1 in May was Roger Miller’s “King Of The Road”. Much of its success was down to engaging the interest of the large crowd of easy listening buyers, despite having little in common with the genre other than some relatively slick production.

Then in April pop went from mere folk influences to folk proper. Donovan’s “Catch The Wind” went to #4. More importantly, Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” saw a single release and went to #9. Up to this time, Dylan had largely remained underground in the UK; despite being released back in ’63, his “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album only hit the top of the album charts as “The Times They Are A-Changin’” hit the singles chart.

With all these genres floating about, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find perennial favourite the novelty record making one of its many comebacks. The Barron Knights’ “Pop Go The Workers” was the second of their parody records mocking the idea of pop groups going back to ordinary things (the army in “Call Up The Groups”, day jobs in this one). I was about to dislike this one on general principle, but I have to concede it’s technically rather competent and pretty funny — 40 years but maybe not a million miles from a Bill Bailey musical interlude.

Still, this is a history of pop, not comedy routines on 45. So, “Stop! In The Name Of Love”, a #7 from April. One of the criticisms you could level at Motown is they could take the “factory” part of being a hit factory a little too much to heart at times, and while this is a competent record it’s also just a tiny bit Supremes-by-numbers at this point. Which is a shame, as in isolation it’s a great pop record. I suppose if you’re going to pick a repetitive formula, this is one of the better ones.

The Beatles were far more successful at iterating on an idea. Having declared their embrace of R&B with “I Feel Fine”, the lads went all out on “Ticket To Ride”, a #1 at the end of April. Or maybe I just like it because they finally made that record which I thought they should have made out of the last 15 seconds of “A Hard Day’s Night”.

They weren’t the only ones: the Animals had just released “Bring It On Home To Me” (#7 May ’65). Even the Everly Brothers were getting in on the act with “The Price Of Love” going to #2 in June. Easy listening was keeping up its performance too: Sandie Shaw’s “Long Live Love” was on its way to #1 and the genre’s premier composer Burt Bacharach was recording his own material with “Trains and Boats and Planes”.

Herman’s Hermits recorded Sam Cooke song “Wonderful World” for a #7 in April — it was a tribute after Cooke’s unfortunate death, but ended up being a bigger hit than the original.

But the big story in ’65 was that just after Britain had finally discovered Bob Dylan, he’d discovered the Fender Stratocaster. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (#9 May ’65) is the point at which Dylan stopped being a folk artist and started being a Bob Dylan artist, complete with a very early example of the music video in which Dylan drops flashcards on the floor in time to the music.

Of all the odd things going on, perhaps the strangest was Elvis #1 “Crying In The Chapel” — a five year old recording that had been held back by record company RCA Victor. When you’re used to Elvis as a reflector of what was current, this record comes as rather a surprise until you realise those circumstances.

As the Stones had tired of being the noisiest noise, so did the Kinks, and “Set Me Free” was an early example of them starting to break away from their slashed-speaker sound. The Who also showed that they had plans to develop their sound “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere” (#10 July ’65), a feedback-ridden freakout that finishes with voices calling out from deep underneath Keith Moon’s drumming.

Both were eclipsed by The Hollies with one of their finest moments: “I’m Alive” was #1 right at the end of June ’65, featuring vibrato-drenched guitar and a neat little solo. To think they nearly decided not to record it!

Dylan may have plugged in, but not everyone was willing to follow on that antagonistic journey. Donovan’s “Colours” (#4 July ’65) is still staunchly acoustic. However, some were so inspired they not only quit the now-stuffy folk scene to go electric, they even started electrifying Dylan’s older material. I refer, of course, to The Byrds; Jim (later Roger) McGuinn, Gene Clark and David Crosby. “Mr Tambourine Man” was a UK #1 for them in July.

Immediately below it was the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full Of Soul”. Page had passed on the Yardbirds gig at first, but had recommended Jeff Beck in his stead. Beck certainly didn’t find the band too much fun to play in: “Heart Full Of Soul” features Indian-influenced guitar played through a fuzz pedal, chanting and a galloping guitar that’s reminiscent of “Johnny Remember Me”. It might not have been easy to get hold of obscure blues records in ’65, but there were some damn good ones you could pick up off the bestsellers shelf.

One of the things that’s notable about the chart music of the mid-’60s is how enduring it’s been. We’re talking about records that were cast in vinyl over fifty years ago and yet they’re still being used for film soundtracks, and not just as a cue to let us know when the story’s set. This was not due to some golden age of non-manufactured pop, either; the Brill Building, the Motown and Philles hit factories, the producers like Mickie Most telling bands what to record and what to release as singles were just as deliberate pop artifices as any later construct. Even notionally authentic beat groups would be bundled together by their producers into package tours aimed at cross-promotion.

If you ask me, the difference is that pop was still a young form, and was still yet to accrue any of the world-weary cynicism that comes with age. Partly this was because there was so much more to explore in 1965 — more things had not been done than had been done, and it was easy for each new single to try something new.

So it was that when Eric Burdon and the Animals were mining blues vocal lines for the sound of “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” (#2 August ’65) it wasn’t the oldest trick in the book, it was one of the most recent. Oddly the single had come from Brill Building writers Cynthia Mann and Barry Weil, and was originally intended for the Righteous Brothers — if you listen closely you can almost imagine this as their trademark blue-eyed soul with a Spector-produced backing.

I think this was my big problem with the pop of the ’50s. So much of it was weary and cynical: do the same thing, find some inconsequential gimmick to stick over the top, and failing all else make a novelty record. The negative resonance is particularly strong because those same things are what went wrong with pop for me as a teenager and young adult, until the cynicism became so blatant the industry started making TV programmes showing you how they did it.

It’s telling that one of the eras I ended up seeking solace in was the mid ’60s. If there was any cynicism in the production of something like Dusty’s “In The Middle Of Nowhere” (#8 August ’65) then it never made it as far as the record. The pop we remember from this era is as earnest as more serious folk songs like Joan Baez’s “There But For Fortune”, another August #8.

It’s easy to conclude this was a great era based on records like August’s #1 “Help”, another Beatles chart-topper whose rampant energy occludes an acoustic rhythm line that takes a surprising amount from the folk records of the year — slowed down, its chord progression could easily be a Joan Baez number.

But we know from the ’50s that the good records always get remembered, even if they were rare islands in a sea of disappointment. Sitting in the middle of my playlist are some records that on first impression are about to snap me out of my appreciative reverie. Something like Sam The Sham & The Pharoahs’ surf-esque “Wooly Bully” veers dangerously close to gimmickry and novelty. (Come on, it’s a song about a cat!) But it’s not horrible.

Remember Russ Conway and his sausage factory of identical piano records? Horst Jankowski could have been his ’60s equivalent, but the pianist’s “A Walk In The Black Forest” (originally titled “Eine Schwarzwaldfahrt”) has some great jazz piano, a lovely little muted guitar line and top-notch production. Similarly Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone To The Moon” is a lush, inviting record. A sitcom punchline it might eventually become, but easy listening was going great guns in 1965. Each record was #3 and #4 respectively as August turned to September.

Even “Zorba’s Dance” is at least well remembered, and much of its status as novelty has been thrust upon it retrospectively — upon release, it was a record from a film soundtrack (admittedly a comedy one), and in the context of the other two records it doesn’t stand out as an oddity. Also, it does not get as fast as you think you remember it does.

As apologist as this viewpoint is, even I have to admit that these records have nothing on the finest pop of the era. It may have become demoted to set dressing for Groundhog Day since, but Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” is an outright great piece of pop. It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to find that Sonny Bono worked for Phil Spector, and there’s a decent complement of the Wrecking Crew present for proceedings. The lyrics are simplistic, direct and positive, a deliberate attempt to produce the opposite of a Bob Dylan record. All of the complexity is in the production, providing a rich sonic background to the husband-and-wife call and response structure. Naturally, a #1. People in the mid ’60s knew quality when they heard it.

While famed for the kind of acerbic break-up songs “I Got You Babe” deliberately wasn’t, Bob Dylan could pen more positive sentiments. The Byrds cover of “All I Really Want To Do” is a perfect example of Dylan’s lyrics being a little more sanguine about the end of a relationship.

One relationship nearing its end, if not yet entirely over, was that of the charts and Joe Meek. Honeycombs record “That’s The Way” was a respectable #12 at the end of September, but it’s far from the pioneering adventure you’d expect of an RGM Sound record. Instead it’s a wistfully sad sort of thing that while not entirely dated is still somewhat out of step with the rest of the era.

From a new song sounding old to an old song updated: The Righteous Brothers released their version of “Unchained Melody” in August, but compared to the excitement earlier in the year it was only a modest #14. They were beaten at their own game by Scott, John and Gary Walker: musicians of no familial relation who’d taken the stage surname Walker. “Make It Easy On Yourself” took the #1 slot at the end of September with John and Scott’s vocals over an appropriately big production for a song written by easy listening’s favourite usual suspects Bacharach and David.

It took #1 from a very different record: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. Although recorded earlier in the year and released in the US, suggestive lyrics and a refusal to play it by mainstream radio stations meant you’d only hear it on pirate radio in Britain until its eventual Decca release at the end of August. The fuzz-toned guitar riff was originally a scratch idea to be replaced by horns, but they kept it in.

Folk kept its position in the charts as the year rolled to an end. Joan Baez had a minor hit at #22 with her version of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” but the big hit was Barry McGuire’s “Eve Of Destruction” (#3 November ‘65). Unexpectedly, Wrecking Crew member Hal Blaine turned up on drums along with other premier session musicians, including the song’s writer P.F. Sloan on guitar. The single as released was intended only to be a rough demo, but a leak and early radio airplay caused it to be the final cut.

Where was Bob Dylan amongst all of this folk? “Maggie’s Farm” had been a raucous hit earlier in the year, but September ’65 was the point at which he stopped being a folk musician in one snare hit and six minutes of aggravated noise. I refer of course to “Like A Rolling Stone”, a September #4 that’s surrounded by legends such as newbie session musician Al Kooper sitting down at the organ and consistently coming in half a bar late. “That’s what I want,” says Dylan, or some approximation thereof.

This is the song infamous for an exchange between Dylan and the crowd at the Manchester Free Trade hall in May ‘66. “Judas!” comes a yell, followed by cheers and a few heckles that are indistinct on the recording. “I don’t believe you,” responds Dylan. A few seconds of the band preparing to starts the song later, he adds, “You’re a liar!” Then the bit you usually don’t hear reported, which is that he turns to his band and says, quite audibly, “play it fuckin’ loud.” They do precisely this for the next seven and a half minutes. The other bit you don’t often hear about is the audience give Dylan and his band a massive round of applause when they’re done. “Thank you,” says Dylan. He’s proved his point.

And yet with Dylan now firmly electric, covers of his songs all over the place (such as Manfred Mann’s “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”), the Beatles and Stones getting bolder with every record, easy listening at its creative peak… enough people bought Ken Dodd’s “Tears” to send it to #1 in October and keep it in the charts for 24 weeks. Well, I guess if you liked awful records there wasn’t much else around.

Everything else was quality. Union City band The McCoys had a slinky bass line on “Hang On Sloopy”, an October #5. Back at home in East London, the Small Faces signed to Decca, half-inched a Solomon Burke guitar line and hit #14 with “What’cha Gonna Do About It”, a staunchly brattish record that was firmly in the wake of the Stones and the Who. The Yardbirds continued their devotion to having relentless fun while the tape was rolling with “Evil Hearted You”, a November #3 that sounds like it was as enjoyable to record as it is to listen to.

Fundamentally, “Tears” was an anomaly. The last three months of 1965 were about to explode with genres, ideas and above all outstanding records.

I think I need to admit I have a problem with this era. When I started this project, I had this idea of creating a big playlist, then picking a few notable songs off it to weave a high-level story of pop around. In this fashion we’d take a whistle stop tour from 1954 to the present day, and I could experience the seventeen or so years of pop I missed with a useful feeling of historical context.

Throughout the ’50s this worked out roughly as planned. Mainly because the pace of progress was so sluggish, the hits so horrible and the moments of promise so fleeting that I simply didn’t want to talk about most of the records on my playlist. But as the decade turned and interesting things started to happen, the number of years I could get through in a thousand and a half words started to drop. Until we hit the point of late 1965 where I’m looking at my list of records that might be worth talking about and realising I want to mention almost every single one of them because I like them so much.

Let’s start with November #4 “Here It Comes Again” by The Fortunes. What I like about this is that somewhere under there is a circa-’63 Merseybeat record, but it’s been so dressed up with big strings and wall of sound-aping production that you have to dig deep to find it. It’s only the lack of brothers Righteous or Walker that stops it from being completely buried.

At #7 in the same month was The Animals’ “It’s My Life”. I heard this a lot later than most of their big hits — when my dad cleared out all his old vinyl I rescued an album called “The Most Of The Animals” from it, but the one we had was a 1971 Music For Pleasure re-release with a different track listing and no “It’s My Life”. Instead, it took until upper sixth form and my first serious relationship to find that my girlfriend at the time had a 16-track CD edition of said album with this included.

In a way, it was quite appropriate that I didn’t hear this one until sixth form. If I had to pick an Animals anthem for secondary school it would have been “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”, because from my point of view secondary school was an impassive grinding engine designed to crush away every last bit of weird a kid might possess until they fitted neatly into one of the predefined cliques. But when we hit lower sixth, the idea of “weird” became accepted, then in upper sixth it was the people with unusual tastes and hobbies who everyone wanted to go to the pub with. The indie lads might have ruled the social scene two years previous, but it turned out saying “buzzes like a fridge” and chuckling wasn’t enough to sustain three hours of conversation in The Victoria of an evening.

And hence “It’s My Life” was the perfect statement for this new, more independent form of education in which you could do what you want and think what you want.

When I talk about escaping the pop world of the late ’90s, this is the beginning of era I retreated to most. So while I can tell that story about the Animals, I could just as easily spend paragraphs reminiscing over sitting at a tatty old desk hacking on university programming assignments to November #1 “Get Off Of My Cloud” by the Rolling Stones. There’s an immediacy and instant accessibility to records like this. You don’t have to immerse yourself in the social history of the era or play it back-to-back with a skiffle track to understand why people liked it. Besides which, the teenage themes which drove both this and The Who’s “My Generation” (#2 December ’65) have since become universal, whether your generation is Pete Townshend’s or not.

It’s rumoured that Bob Dylan wrote “Positively 4th Street” (#8 December ’65) about the Greenwich Village folk scene and the kind of people who shouted “Judas!” at concerts. At least, several from the Village scene took umbrage at what they thought were unnecessarily nasty personal remarks. But shorn of that relevance, it still speaks to anyone who’s had to deal with false people, messy ends to relationships or any other situation where you want to say something starting with, “you got a lot of nerve…”

Len Barry’s “1–2–3” hit #3 in December and while becoming embroiled in a plagiarism case with Motown (and eventually ceding a percentage of the royalties to Holland-Dozier-Holland) still set out the sound that would eventually become known as Northern Soul: upbeat tracks you wanted to dance to, that found a regular home long after release on the playlist of Wigan Casino from ’73 to ‘81. Incidentally the track it was supposed to have copied, “Ask Any Girl” is more protozoic Northern Soul. Some of the elements are there, but it’s definitely a standing on the shoulders of giants moment in my book. The intro may be a little slow, even with the nod to “I Feel Fine” thrown in there, but “Let’s Hang On” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons is another definitive track.

Pop-folk hit one of its finer moments with The Seekers’ “The Carnival Is Over” (a huge #1 in December ’65, spending 15 weeks on the charts), a wistful number that found its natural fit being performed for closing ceremonies. If you preferred arrivals over departures you could have the Walker Brothers’ “My Ship Is Coming In”, a typically lush production.

I already mentioned how the Kinks had begun to evolve from merely another early Stones-esque noise, and while “Till The End Of The Day” is still suitably raucous, it’s much closer to the typical pop of the time. This and the album it’s from (“The Kink Kontroversy”) mark a transitional period for the band: drummer Mick Avory nearly departed over arguments with Dave Davies, which combined with illness meant Clem Cattini filling in on drums in the studio, while their reputation for onstage antics and a ban on performing in the US impacted their success Stateside at a time the Stones and Beatles were storming the other side of the Atlantic in what was known as the British Invasion.

More well-remembered than the Kinks’ transitional period is “Keep On Running” by the Spencer Davis Group, which would eventually hit #1 in early ’66. Ditto “My Girl”, but possibly not the version you expect. Otis Redding’s Stax-recorded take entered the charts in December ’65 after the UK record-buying public failed to take to the Temptations’ cut, eventually going to #11. It’s well worth a listen. If Motown’s sound was about being relentlessly tight and on the beat every single beat, then Stax is the opposite: all about getting as loose as you can.

Booker T & The M.G.s were the house band, and are in top form on this record. Steve Cropper’s guitar positively slinks around Duck Dunn’s relaxed bass groove. Cropper said in an interview that he didn’t really bother with timing while playing live, instead just picking a member of the audience and playing guitar to their dancing. I reckon that’s a little bit one of those guitarist tall tales, but there’s a kernel of truth to it — this single is a talented band doing what sounds good rather than what’s technically exact.

Of course, this wouldn’t be my commentary on pop without a villain of the day. And so, with impeccable timing, up pops Ken Dodd with “The River”, a December #3 that somehow manages to ignore absolutely every last thing that happened in pop since that very first chart of 1952. This was a point at which easy listening had justifiably supplanted the Template by taking all the good things from it and casting aside the horrible tendency to churn out the same plodding record time after time… and yet here’s Ken, still having massive hits with it. I’ve mentioned a dozen far better records in this article and yet people still managed to walk past all of them in the shop and buy this instead.

But thankfully 1965 didn’t close out with Ken Dodd. Instead, the end of the year belonged to the Beatles, with a double 'A' side of “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out” hitting #1 at the end of December and spending 11 weeks in the chart. “Day Tripper” is an up-to-the-minute single with an infamous riff at the core of the song, a bit of rocking out a minute and a half in, and some rather Kinks-esque vocals.

However, for me it’s “We Can Work It Out” that’s the better of the two 'A' sides. If I have a criticism of “Day Tripper”, it’s that it’s just a melange of 1965 pop ideas mildly Beatleised with a vocal harmony or two. But until “We Can Work It Out”, nobody in ’65 was using a harmonium on their record. The Beatles weren’t always the ceaselessly innovative, found sound experimenters they have the reputation for being, but when they were, they did it masterfully. They’re not using the harmonium as a gimmick; it’s an integral, nay essential part of the song. DJs seemed to prefer it too, as “We Can Work It Out” saw far more radio airplay than its flip side.

1966 was not going to be a dull year.

1966

As 1965 gave way to 1966 you’d be forgiven for thinking that pop had given its all for one amazing year, and would once more gradually decline into me-too acts and novelties until the next big thing arrived to supplant the rhythm and blues influenced, beat group powered sound that had provided the core around which much of ’64 and ’65 had been built.

I’m not talking about things like Herb Alpert’s “Spanish Flea” (#3 February ’66) here, as brassy instrumentals had been a fairly steady undercurrent through much of the ’60s since “Theme From A Summer Place” kicked the whole thing off, and made the occasional breakthrough even after their heyday.

The problem was that the excitement of the bands who broke R&B was giving way to the kind of by-rote singles and me-tooishness that had made the Template era such an endless samey drag. Take the Overlanders’ “Michelle”, at #1 in February the most successful of a completely unnecessary series of cover versions that were opportunistically released as singles after the Beatles left the original song as an album exclusive. It added nothing, other than giving the record-buying public of the mid-1960s the opportunity to have an somewhat inferior copy of a track they otherwise would not have been able to afford — albums were still a rare treat, and many teenagers could only afford singles.

Even the original songs like Crispian St. Peters’ “You Were On My Mind” (#2 February ’66) were devoid of excitement, taking a soporific journey through two and a half minutes without stopping anywhere interesting along the way. Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders sound almost apologetic on “A Groovy Kind Of Love” with a dragging beat and a for-the-hell-of-it key change that turns into a bad idea the moment the vocal kicks back in. It even ends in the most perfunctory, clock-watching way at exactly two minutes.

As a naive teenager, I once walked into Woolworths and saw a compilation called something like “The Essential Sixties Collection” or “The Ultimate Sixties Collection” or something of that ilk. £20 for 8 CDs, and something like 160 tracks. I couldn’t resist: finding ’60s records up to this point had meant staying up late to listen to Mike Sweeney on Capital Gold, and yet here they all were in one pack with dozens of records I was yet to hear.

Naturally there was such great disappointment when I got it home: the telling phrase “original hits re-recorded” buried in the corner of the liner notes. This was my first brush with K-Tel Records, a company who specialised in licensing covers by middling session artists, discarded original takes and decades-later re-recordings by original artists past their prime and out of enthusiasm. They’d use this massive library to release cheap compilations that were good enough for the purposes of background musak or naff theme parties, where nobody cared that all the joy had been painstakingly sapped from the original recordings.

I mean it with that last line. K-Tel’s session musicians and producers were adept at turning in slick but dull covers that clearly meant nothing more to the band than another day’s wages. So when you listened to their take of “Just Like Eddie” it was obviously wrong, devoid of Heinz’s smirking vocal or Joe Meek’s habit of annoying the downstairs neighbours by having his bands jump up and down on the floorboards for extra percussion. The guitarist on their version of “Needles and Pins” didn’t even bother to switch to the bridge pickup, so little did authenticity matter compared to that half a second of time saved in the studio.

And yet, when it came to this period of hits from the very start of 1966, those ersatz versions were nigh-on indistinguishable from the originals, to the point where you’d need to play them back-to-back to spot the differences.

Of course, doing this retrospectively there’s every possibility that what you find on Spotify or YouTube is actually the K-Tel version. Those things were so omnipresent in their day that for lesser-known artists they would often obliterate the real recording. Search for Len Barry’s February #10 “Like A Baby” and there’s a three in four chance you’ll find something barely fit to be played in an elevator instead of a Northern Soul classic. (Although “Like A Baby” doesn’t half recycle “1–2–3”.)

It particularly afflicts records like the near-forgotten “Mirror Mirror” by Pinkerton’s Colours or whatever band name they were going by that week (#9 February ’66). Listen to it on Spotify and you'd swear it's an unremarkable single with an uncomfortable taste of the K-Tel sound in between its proto-psych turns. The sound of disappointment and realising you’re still going to be staying up past midnight with a radio station, a Sony tape recorder and a stack of blank C-90s. But find an original single and revel in its absolute mad, ahead-of-its time glee which is a perfect fit for Decca's everything-in-the-red-at-all-times approach to mastering.

But this kind of thing was a sad rarity, and possibly why that early output from Pinkerton's Assort. Band Names did anomalously well. As I say, between the genuine Sound of K-Tel and the historical fog of Substituted K-Tel, you’d be forgiven for expecting the pop sound of ’65 to fizzle out, while Template-tinged tracks like Eddy Arnold’s country “Make The World Go Away” and Barbra Streisand’s ‘50s-esque novelty “Second Hand Rose” (#14 February ’66) took pop back to exactly where it had been in 1952.

But then rock royalty turned up and made the case for why they became rock royalty.

Bob Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl out Your Window” flew under the radar at #17, but was a straight statement of the “thin wild mercury sound” that Dylan would spend the year trying to capture. From the false start to the self-referential end, I can see why he kicked Phil Ochs out of a limousine for saying it wasn’t a great record.

Peaking at #2 in late February was “19th Nervous Breakdown”. Sound of K-Tel this is not. The Rolling Stones play as if they’re in a mad rush to get as many lyrics out as possible, giving the record subtle tones of Dylan circa “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.

Soul? 15 year old Stevie Wonder gave us “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” for the Motown label. Merely #14 in the UK; as per the later rise of Northern Soul, British soul record buyers were more of a loyal crowd than a large one. It’s a record with a lot going on.

This, I think, is what defines the thankfully short-lived early ’66 Sound of K-Tel era. The records sound like they’re an attempt to find the minimum you need to have a hit single. While something like March Small Faces #3 “Sha-la-la-la-lee” is simple, it’s simple in a kitchen sink, throw everything you have at it sort of way, whereas records like Lou Christie’s “Lightnin’ Strikes” or the myriad covers of “Michelle” only put in what was necessary to make them stand up, even if the end result wasn’t that good.

In stark contrast, “These Boots Are Made For Walking”, a February #1 for Nancy Sinatra, took minimalism as a serious design choice rather than a consequence of laziness. With the Wrecking Crew on the instruments, it alternates between the kind of rich pop opulence you’d hear on a Dusty Springfield record, and the stripped back starkness of Chuck Berghofer’s bass walking down behind acoustic guitar, or even only Nancy singing a capella.

It made March #3 “Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys sound rather corny by comparison. Surf’s great advantage of arriving fully-formed had now become a drawback, as it had failed to evolve in any meaningful way. What the Beach Boys needed was the kind of reinvention former Template artist Petula Clark had gone through — March #4 “My Love” was far more contemporary, another slice of everything and the kitchen sink pop that threw in squealing country guitars, bouncing horns, swirling strings and even a choir.

Kitchen sink pop’s auteur, though, was Phil Spector. I may have said that what he did couldn’t be copied, but there is one notable exception, one that possibly sounded the final note for lazy pop in ’66. Copy the wall of sound is exactly what the Walker Brothers did on their cover of “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”, a massive March #1 that spent 11 weeks at or near the top of the charts.

One of my main objections to covers like those of “Michelle” is that they provide nothing that could not be achieved by listening to a superior original. It’s fine for a tribute act or a local band playing village halls, but records can be reproduced and there is limited need for identikit recordings — cheaper purchases (converting album-only tracks into singles) or cheaper licensing (a la K-Tel) being the main excuses.

A good cover, on the other hand…  listen to the Frankie Valli original and then listen to the Walker Brothers. The former is a good record, but there’s a reason the latter is so definitive few people even realise it’s a cover. It’s one of the most incredible pop productions ever committed to vinyl, and not so much throwing in everything and the kitchen sink as driving round in a van picking up additional kitchen sinks just so you can throw them in as well.

After a bit of a patchy start, 1966 finally felt like it had the potential to continue 1965’s string of excellent pop, even down to having its own equivalent of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”.

The UK Singles chart for 31st March 1966 featured an incredible top five. At the top was “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”, but immediately below it were The Hollies with “I Can’t Let Go”, a brilliant follow-up to “I’m Alive”. It was originally written in 1965 by Brill Building alumnus Al Gorgoni and a failed golfer called Chip Taylor. The first version was recorded by Evie Sands, a much more soul-oriented affair.

At #3 was the fuzzed-out “Shapes of Things” by the Yardbirds, one of the earliest records to exhibit the tropes of psychedelia. Psychedelic records took the kind of found-sound experimentation used to augment records like “I Feel Fine” and turned it into the main attraction. Fuzz and feedback were popular, drugged-up lyrics taking in nursery rhymes or Daliesque scenes not uncommon, and records often featured abrupt changes in tempo and style. Disappearing into a random freak-out was another hallmark, eventually taken to its extreme by a band called The Red Crayola who’d invite people to rev motorbikes and bang on rocks for several minutes in what they termed “free-form freak outs”.

However, that was a definite step away from pop, whereas “Shapes of Things” was still catchy enough to be a Top 3 hit even with Jeff Beck’s experimental guitar.

Also experimenting were the Kinks. “Till the End of the Day” had hinted at a maturing band, but at #4 in that end-of-March chart was “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”. Not only had the Kinks toned down their aggressive guitar tone into something not a million miles from Dylan’s “wild mercury sound”, but this was the first of their singles to feature Ray Davies’ sardonic observational lyrics. Here, he mocked the rise of designer boutiques and increasingly outrageous fashions that had people taking to the wearing of velvet suits and feather boas; while emblematic of the era this kind of fast-changing fashion was only available to a wealthy elite, and the average man on the street would be more concerned with fixing his BSA motorcycle (to ride to work, not to feature on a Red Crayola album) than he would be with buying a voguish purple jacket that’d be out of favour within a month. Davies sided with the underdogs.

Rounding out that top 5 was Bob Lind’s folky “Elusive Butterfly”, with members of the ever-prolific Wrecking Crew backing him up. (Val Doonican’s crooning cover was just below it). What’s notable about all of these records is not only that they’re so good, but that they’re so different from each other. Pop had always spun multiple plates (the Template usually one of them) but as of 1966 the sheer number of different movements and ideas would have made it a virtuoso act.

I try not to get caught up in the trap of looking back at charts of yore as some vintage perfection which shall never again be obtained, but I admit it's a little hard not to when you're staring down the prospect of a fifth consecutive Christmas number one about sausage rolls while looking at 1966, an absolutely vintage year for "the charts" as a concept.

A great example is The Who's "Substitute", peaking at #5 in April '66. On the one hand it's joyful, lunkish noise, but there are smarts with it - there's some craft in the way it shambles to a near-stop two and a bit minutes in then crashes back in to proclaim it was born with a plastic spoon in its mouth.

What I like about this era is this sense of unashamed joy about the production of pop music. People had fun making these records, and perhaps none more so than Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. 1966 sees them making their first forays into being regular chart visitors with "Hold Tight!", an excitable stomp from a band who embraced being pop and all of the ridiculous stage theatrics and wild dressing that could entail in the latter part of the mid-'60s.

If it feels like the pace of my coverage has slowed to a point even the average Template record would be moving at a fair old clip by comparison, it's because this truly is an era to revel in, where so many singles are crate-digging delights.

I often have a shaky relationship with covers, especially when they concern a song that's been consistently in my list of desert island discs for most of my adult life, but The Bachelors' cover of "The Sound Of Silence" is an example of taking a great record and turning it into a great pop record. We've had our run-ins with the boys from Dublin in these pages, but I cannot fault this treatment, dramatic key changes and all. Even if it does sound a little like they've made one gear change too many and the thing is getting away from them a bit, it's not like a slight feeling of being out of control ever hurt a pop record. A deserved #3 in that same April week where "Hold Tight!" holds tight on the #4 spot and "Substitute" sits at #5.

Another thing which keeps me dwelling in early '66 is the habit of singles to bring the bombast. Cher's "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" gives a fair dose of it along with the kind of mysterious intrigue Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra would later make their own (including a cover of this very record), but it has nothing on the enormous #1 of May '66: Dusty Springfield's "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me"

Originally an Italian number "Io che non vivo (senza te)", the song apparently reduced Dusty to tears upon hearing it back in '65 and she decided to return the favour by recording a version that can only be described as Big with at least one capital letter, probably three. Echoes of Joe Meek there with the vocal recorded in a stairwell to get just the right amount of natural echo, although endearingly homemade this single is definitely not. I know it's schmaltz, I know behind the scenes it's all Wizard of Oz artifice but I cannot come away with anything but a massive soft spot for these knowingly huge-sounding records and it's far from the last we're going to hear in 1966.

Somewhat more raw although with a surprising amount of showtune influence is The Lovin' Spoonful's "Daydream". A May #2, it was the Spoonful's first major flirtation with the UK chart. They'd had earlier success back at home in the US with "Do You Believe In Magic" and "You Didn't Have To Be So Nice", although when it comes to the latter I'd direct you toward The Glass Menagerie's 1968 cover, a record as beautiful as it was utterly chart-untroubling.

Trading places with Dusty for that #1 spot were Manfred Mann with "Pretty Flamingo", a song which I taped off a rather muffled AM broadcast many years ago and thus ended up consistently mishearing one of the lyrics as "browns off the neighbourhood", which is rather at odds with the original sentiment of brightening up the neighbourhood. I might have struggled with recognising the lyrics but you'd definitely recognise this as the Manfreds, somehow they managed to make this particular guitar tone uniquely theirs and I'm still not entirely sure how.

Now, you might think it'd be nice to get beyond this month without spending a whole paragraph on every single which managed to achieve a significant chart position during it, but unfortunately hitting #2 toward the end of May '66 was the second single from Pet Sounds, "Sloop John B".

The Beach Boys had made "Caroline, No" the first single from the album and it had sunk without trace, no big surprise as it's all a bit weird for the charts and, let's be honest here, also quite rubbish. "Sloop John B" on the other hand - this may be a tired refrain from me at this point, but it's 1966 and it's another utterly brilliant pop single. You might want to nitpick at the euphoric arrangement compared to the utter bleakness of the I-don't-wanna-be-here lyrics, but I do not care and frankly neither did the legions who bought it. This was pop that was crafted, music with artifice to match its swagger. The Beatles would be taking note.

Let's skip ahead a little, over the Merseybeats with their cover of the McCoys' "Sorrow", and also a record which for all its later importance was a slow-burning performer that skulked around the bottom of the charts for a few weeks without ever breaking through, "California Dreamin'" by the Mamas and the Papas. Because we have an absolutely huge single, in both sonic and sales terms.

We'd last left Frank Sinatra bearing the standard for the Template in the late '50s, and as if the charts of mid-'66 were not crowded enough he decided this was the time for a proper chart comeback, although this was less a sudden return than the culmination of something which had been gathering momentum starting with an odds and ends album in '65.

You know what? "Strangers In The Night" is OK. It fits in. Maybe not with the itchy, angular records of The Who or the Yardbirds, but you could stage a decent argument for it being on the same shelf as Dusty Springfield and the Walkers, both absolutely contemporary acts for '66. The "dooby dooby doo" is an anachronistic trademark and there's perhaps more than a little hint this is a late '50s performance rendered in mid '60s brushstrokes but look, it's fine and I am not angered by its presence in these charts.

So anyway, here's "Wild Thing".

The Troggs are great because they're such a wilful anachronism. I make this case for the '60s being this push toward greater sophistication and bigger (or failing that, at least cleverer) sounds and then these four lads come along sounding like they've found some instruments in a shed and thought it'd be a laugh to bash them about a bit. There's even noticeable AC hum in the background of the record. And yet... this may be artifice.

"Wild Thing" was not even their song; it was written by our golfing friend Chip Taylor for a band called the Wild Ones, and their 1965 version is a fine slice of Stateside garage rock with a little Dylanesque wild mercury influence. It also explains a lot about why the Troggs version sounds so out of step with its own times, because they pretty much took that and made it primal and sexual in a way you wouldn't associate with the South of England in the mid-1960s. Besides, it's not entirely the straightforwardly dumb piece of rock-bashing you might first think it is; it's got an ocarina solo. It has been lost to history whether the band were attempting to obtain the Master Sword at the time.

I mentioned that "California Dreamin'" was not an enormous hit and I think viewed as a pop single this makes sense; it's a brittle and wistful record, perhaps too much of a slow burn to make an impact in the tumult of ideas assaulting the charts in 1966. The same cannot be levelled at the follow-up, "Monday Monday".

Dylan's wild mercury sound was one way to bring folk from its abrasive and inaccessible native form to the charts, by slotting it in alongside the spiky noise of the R&B groups. But this was quite another. The Mamas & The Papas allied big, lush pop production to folk's calmer and more pastoral end, with beautiful results. Of course it's the Wrecking Crew in the background, so commonly are they attached to the hits which made their way across the Atlantic.

My own first experiences with these songs was an irrecoverably scratchy Music for Pleasure LP which stacked a load of singles into one compilation, excluding the one song I already knew which was of course "California Dreamin'". I guess by 1974 it had become more expensive to licence than good old MfP cared to spend. Even through the haze of a damaged record they were big, soft and comforting, and made it all the more saddening that the band's history after breaking up was all rather tragic.

Anyway, back to the charts. And there's only another Ken Dodd single there, "Promises" hitting #6 in mid-June but being one of those things which stinks up the chart for weeks, 13 of them in this case. As ever you could stuff this in the middle of 1958 and nobody would notice, and it serves mainly as a reminder that even if you walk into a record shop and see a solid wall of quality some people will dig down into the corner and walk out with a truly awful record-purchasing decision.

One thing the Mamas & the Papas heralded was the arrival of "the counterculture" - a loose association of ideas and people centred roughly around casting aside the current societal establishment, Ken Dodd and all. That there was a world beyond aspiring to a bowler hat, a pinstripe suit and a Rover 2000, where you dropped out of the rat race, dropped into free love and started speaking up about what your government was up to. It was in 1966 that the first of London's designer clothes shops catering to this group with a decidedly psychedelic bent opened, Granny Takes A Trip in Chelsea.

To a certain extent the radical end of this was more of a US thing, and the UK underground concerned itself more with taking copious quantities of recreational drugs and organising a string of free festivals and benefit gigs for various worthy causes including underground newspapers.

Which explains, perhaps, the presence of Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" in those mid-'66 charts (#7 June 1966). Musically it's a bit questionable, a sort of freewheeling brass band rave-up, but then it's less about the sound than the statement of that double-meaning lyric telling us everybody must get stoned.

June '66 also brings us a fantastic #1. Paint It, Black by the Stones. This takes that Middle Eastern and Indian-influenced sound we've heard on Yardbirds singles and turns it into something dangerous, something dark. Normally you'd have to delve into the more obscure reaches of psychedelia, and often rather later in the decade for a record that is this willing to set you on edge but here it is at the top of the charts. It's not the sort of thing that happens often but I'm all for celebrating it when it does.

Perhaps there was a little subversiveness in the water in that summer of '66, as the Kinks' unapologetically miserabilist Sunny Afternoon followed it on the top slot in July, with a similar mixture of sly lyrical wordplay and a tinge of the music hall that had powered Dedicated Follower Of Fashion.

When I clocked after these two that When a Man Loves a Woman was a chart contemporary (#4 in the last week of June '66), I thought that was a bit of a contrast, but my memory has been made to falter by too many saccharined-up versions gracing more recent films and TV. The Percy Sledge original is all moody and low-key in the way southern soul is so good at, and all the better for it.

Even Gene Pitney's "Nobody Needs Your Love" (#2 July '66) has a little bit of a sullen, rainy vibe to it, although this doesn't quite gel with the classic high-gloss Template strings and Gene's quivery vocal, making it feel a bit like one of those cocktails where you've started out with good intentions but had to substitute so many ingredients the end result comes out not quite right. I'm not saying it's bad, just that it's probably better if you've already had enough to drink that you're not really in the mood for nitpicking.

Now let's talk about a record where every ingredient is perfectly in place, and that's an achievement because there are a hell of a lot of said ingredients. Possibly Phil Spector's last great wall of sound record, Ike & Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High". The duo had produced some cracking soul tracks for Loma Records - check out "Somebody (Somewhere) Needs Me" for a fine example - but this took good soul and transformed it into an unstoppable pop music force for three and a half minutes. Tina puts in a vocal performance that for me goes right up to the line marked "too much" and stays on the correct side of it by mere millimetres. I swear I can listen to this 30-odd years after the first time I heard it on AM radio and still hear new things, so dense is that mix, delightful finger snaps and all.

All of these make me take a dislike to The Beatles' "Paperback Writer" hearing it in this company, because it simultaneously feels like it's trying too hard and yet not delivering anywhere near enough. An assessment similar to that made by critics at the time, who saw this as little more than a throwaway. It's as if with the Stones copying the Beatles' most wildly experimental moments, the boys were responding by copying where the Stones were at two years ago. Of course this is only half the story of this end-of-June #1, because 'B' side "Rain" is great; more experimental, looser and freer, and just all round a more satisfying single even though its much-vaunted reversed tape effects feel more of a gimmick to take us to the fadeout than anything else.

The Rolling Stones were casting a long shadow over these charts (painting them, one might suggest, black) because Chris Farlowe took the Jagger/Richards-penned and Jagger-produced "Out of Time" to #1 in August, despatching Georgie Fame's "Getaway" and its jarringly over-enthusiastic horns from that spot. "Out Of Time" is a good example of what makes a record pop music, as the Stones had their own recording on their Aftermath album, and if you jam it up against the Farlowe version in a line-up and ask someone to pick the one with the big chart position they're either going to be right or the kind of person who answers questions wrong in order to be deliberately obtuse.

The Stones version is a great record, has some groovy marimba going on, but length aside is too spare and strutting for a wide audience, plus that slow start is just a little too arch, the kind of thing which sounds like it can only truly be enjoyed while wearing dark glasses and a black turtleneck. Chris Farlowe's version isn't dumb, but that string intro grabs you and welcomes you in for the ride without any suggestion it might spend the entire journey staring at you in slight disdain. The texture is thick, rich and soupy. Metaphors involving kitchen sinks could be invoked. And yet it somehow all moves with grace and more than a hint of the swagger of that Aftermath version still retained.

While I'm recounting things I stayed up late to tape off AM radio, "Bus Stop" by the Hollies was definitely in there. Peaking at #5, there's a lot more going on that you notice at first, with little touches of the baroque peeking out between the simple acoustic guitar and vocal.

Rounding out this little batch of R&B-influenced pop from the middle of the year is "Black Is Black" by Spanish group Los Bravos, evidently commenting on a situation after everyone's out of time to stop the Stones on their painting rampage. It's a good slice of the kind of international beat singles the Nuggets II compilation would later popularise, with some pleasing soul influences that remind me a little of Len Barry's 1-2-3.

Enjoy it for now, because things are about to start going a bit wrong.

Or rather they've been happily bubbling away going wrong under my rather skewed radar, and I'm going to call attention to them a bit. 1966 is an absolutely vintage year in its highs, but there's been rather a lot more Ken Dodd than I care to see round these parts, and the "will this do?" level pop of Crispian St. Peters et. al. has been forming an unwelcome crust at the bottom of the pot, most offensively with Cliff Richard's half-hearted cover of "Blue Turns To Grey" burying the thoroughly excellent Epics version.

Let's check in with some of these. "The More I See You", a Chris Montez #3 from August that seems to have been assembled with a brief of elevator music. Dave Berry's "Mama", a song I want to end before it's got 20 seconds in and doesn't get any better with its Template plod and sappy lyrics. "Love Letters" is Elvis-by-numbers, and the fact Presley decided it needed re-recording even for something as low-stakes as a 1970 leftovers album gives you an idea what we're dealing with here.

The whole concept of the slow, wistful number was done much better by Dusty Springfield on her recording of Goffin and King's "Goin' Back", a song which for all its intentional hugeness, big swooping strings and all, oddly parallels the tendency of psychedelic records to ponder the idea of heading back to childhood. It is beautiful, and does that thing of building to a crescendo better than any Template record ever managed, before dropping back to a plaintive a capella coda followed by gentle piano. A shame all those dirges kept it off the top slots - despite later recognition, it peaked at #10.

Some cobwebs did get blown away by The Troggs returning to their garden shed and picking up an assortment of tools to record "With A Girl Like You", one Reg Presley had in the bag from pre-band days and even more simplistic than it was originally intended to be - those "ba ba ba ba ba"s were supposed to be trumpets, and that would absolutely have been worse than the homemade honesty of the end result.

It was #1, and the number of times I've mentioned that particular chart position adds weight to what my glacial progress through this time period is suggesting; there was a lot going on in 1966. However, it is all crystallising around three major influences:

• Sharp-edged, simple guitar band music with a hefty chunk of R&B in it, c.f. Manfred Mann's excellent Dylan cover "Just Like A Woman" or a song whose title is descriptive of its playing style, the Small Faces' "All Or Nothing" (another 1966 #1, late September in this case)
• Big pop, with a clear lineage from '66 all the way back to "Here In My Heart". Sometimes obviously so in the case of Roy Orbison's "Too Soon To Know" or Jim Reeves' "Distant Drums", the latter of which displaced "All Or Nothing" after a mere week - see what I mean about how short-lived these chart-toppers were!
• Soul, whether dressed up in pop finery or served as-is in the case of The Supremes' "You Can't Hurry Love", an up-tempo, swinging record that Phil Collins just couldn't leave alone.

These were far from isolated tribes, and a hit would often cross two streams, as with the Beach Boys' next release "God Only Knows", filtering big pop through the lens of a band who still just about sounded identifiably like a surf group. It's solidly down the middle as Pet Sounds singles go - it's not a "Caroline, No" but then it's no "Sloop John B" either.

And then sitting underneath all of it, undermining my whole three-influence point, is that old villain of the charts: novelty.

The Beatles were up to their old double 'A' side tricks, and depending on which side of it you look at, they're either with me on the three genres point or with me on the novelty one.

"Eleanor Rigby" is a Beatle attempt at Big Pop of the sad, wistful bent and they've made a decent go of it, transition between the pared-back verses and big chorus included. I just.... it's not fun though, is it? "Eleanor Rigby" for me is like watching the kid who always gets As on their homework get congratulated for getting another A. It is competent, it is well done, if I go back through the last 200 songs in my list I will probably find it's sonically adventurous for its time but I would still rather be at the back of the classroom with the kid who's spent the last half hour painting an enormous willy on the curtains with Tipp-Ex.

Which is going to be The Who, isn't it? Surprisingly unregrettable for a 56 year old set of lyrics concerning gender identity, although that's perhaps a hint the '60s counterculture was a lot more liberal and accepting than people like to remember it, Star Trek's egalitarian future and all, "I'm A Boy" is a glorious rush that feels like it takes half the time of "Eleanor Rigby" despite being 40 seconds longer. #2 in October, proving at least this side of the pond we weren't afraid to tangle with such concepts.

But I get ahead of myself. There's another 'A' side on "Eleanor Rigby", and even if it's not intended as an outright novelty it hews dangerously close to one. "Yellow Submarine", a collision between an attempt to write a children's song and to fill a record with a huge number of sound effects, is all the worst of the Beatles for me: cloyingly twee, throwing away studio experimentation on mere background gimmicks, and trying so hard to be a happy clap-along without offending anyone that it, well, offends me. Look, it's probably a fine song if you're 7 years old, which is about the point I encountered it in a VHS copy of the 1968 cartoon film of the same name. Mission accomplished, I guess. Although even then my youthful ears knew "Only A Northern Song" was the interesting cut.

Another novelty with a worryingly high chart position (#4 going into September '66) was one-hit wonder Napoleon XIV with "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" which is about as rewarding as that self-consciously wacky title suggests. People, this is the kind of record-purchasing behaviour which killed off rock'n'roll and here in 1966 we're better than that.

There's a surprising amount of sag in these charts going into October. Sonny & Cher's "Little Man" is overwrought and the sad, clownish honks which punctuate it don't quite land the way they're supposed to. The New Vaudeville Band's "Winchester Cathedral" is another obnoxious novelty, and it's not a surprise to find it's an entirely manufactured construct put together by session musicians in an attempt to duplicate the Bonzo Dog Band, whose recording career was just getting started with music hall routines like "My Brother Make The Noises for the Talkies". They got better.

It's getting to the point I'm starting to wonder if all the ne'er-do-wells of the 1950s charts are ganging up to ruin my 1966, with The Sandpipers' "Guantanamera" worryingly close to one of those dire travelogue records from 12 years earlier, although it has a niceness to it those irksome discs don't, including a sweet spoken word monologue and folkish shades reminescent of Joan Baez here and there. They did at least start with a genuine Cuban song, rather than some jobbing songwriter from East Finchley's impression of one.

Of course we couldn't go through this period of novelty without hearing from the deliberate embracers of such inconsequentiality, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich with "Bend It!" acting as their take on Zorba's Dance and, well, at least it sounds like they were having fun.

This is also about the point "Somewhere My Love" by the Mike Sammes Singers enters the charts, although only at the lower reaches and it was a long time before it became a hit in mid-1967. I mention it because this one more than any of the others could have come straight from the '50s. Even Dusty Springfield seemed to be slipping further back through time with each record, perhaps making real on that threat to go back. "All I See Is You", an October #9, takes a lot of time to open up from its rumbling minor-chord piano and while it is nicely made, it wouldn't have raised any eyebrows in, say, 1962. (I will grant it is at least too nicely made to fit in around the utter dirges that passed for chart singles back before then).

It's in this context that I hear the 8-second drone that opens "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?" by the Rolling Stones, and by the time the horns come in we've blown away all of those ho-hum mediocrities and tedious novelties. Why don't the Stones get the credit they deserve for being so consistently interesting in the '60s? Is it that they never really worried about making any of this approachable, preferring to keep their innovation in a forbidding basement down a rickety set of stairs on the far side of a seedy neighbourhood?

I certainly found that as a youthful record collector, the Beatles welcomed me in that much more. They did interesting things, sure, but they did it in a cheery, unchallenging way. Plus it was satisfyingly complete and easy to follow. There was a narrative there, a band who went from simple songs to the dense complexity of Abbey Road, and then called it there barring the string-laden coda of Get Back, recorded earlier but released later.

The Stones meanwhile had a shifting and strange narrative that dipped into psychedelia here and ramshackle coke-fuelled bohemian country there, and if you started at the wrong point you were going to write them off pretty quickly. Worse, the story did not end - in fact your long since past-it relatives would be asking you to buy them recent Stones records for Christmas, and that's always off-putting when you're trying to create this image of a cool and undiscovered past.

Or maybe it was the filtering? Much as The Troggs had been condensed by time to a two-hit discography of "Wild Thing" and "Love Is All Around", ignoring great cuts like "I Can't Control Myself" (#2 November '66) with its false stop and stone-age psychedelic freak out section, the edges had been sanded off the Stones. They had been reduced to little more than "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want", and presented as the sort of bluesy middle-of-road rock adults always seemed to have endless tapes of to go in the car by acts that seemed to be completely made up, like Steve Gravel's Fracture Group or Doctor Hare and the Gerbils.

This filtering is why I had always bypassed '66 in favour of '67 when looking for a go-to music year, because so many of the great songs in this period are from bands whose histories were later edited in favour of later and often milder hits - or in the case of Herman's Hermits edited to seemingly include no songs at all; "No Milk Today" is a great little slice of suburban drama but the radio of my youth seemed content with merely mentioning it existed rather than ever, y'know, playing it.

The same goes for late November #2, "Semi-Detached, Suburban Mr. James". A spitting slice of invective from the Manfreds that borrows a little from the Kinks disdain for the parochial. Oft rumoured to have been written about departed singer Paul Jones, this was mere coincidence, the single having been penned outside the band my Geoff Stephens and John Carter. It features the notorious tape strip based synthesiser the Mellotron, and by extension a classic piece of a Mellotron misbehaving in the studio with it wobbling noticeably out of tune on the big note at 2:08. And yet today it's more likely to be passed over for airtime in favour of later cuts such as "My Name Is Jack" or a song which isn't even their best Dylan cover, "The Mighty Quinn".

We now get perhaps the most famous of the Beach Boys' studio experimentation tracks, "Good Vibrations". Held back from Pet Sounds so it could be finished, this was the one which consumed miles of tape, being put together out of recorded fragments much the same way Delia Derbyshire painstakingly assembled the Doctor Who theme. And this might be a sacrilegious viewpoint coming down the wire but I've always felt the whole was less than the sum of its parts, that this has been trading off marks for effort the last 56 years. There are many interesting and unique fragments but they never quite rise above the fairly dull surf rock driving the core of the single for me. Plus they didn't even use a proper theremin, instead picking a device with a wheel to control those wobbly space effects.

Maybe I'm just wired to go against the grain on those big critical darlings. I've always liked an obscurity, and one of the big influences on my musical taste was the 4CD compilation Nuggets II, a collection of what was presented as obscurities from British pop and the international world. Except as I found while compiling the data for this series, they weren't quite so obscure as I thought.

"My Mind's Eye", a Small Faces track I'd never heard until I stuck all of those Nuggets CDs in a multi-disc changer, made #4 in December '66. It's a shambling piece of psychedelia which slowly morphs into Gloria in Excelsis, but that low fidelity nature is a hint to this single being an unfinished demo released without the band's consent. Another Nuggets classic which you'd think was rescued from the depths is "Friday On My Mind" by The Easybeats, an uptempo one with little hints of that middle east-influenced guitar which was de rigueur for mid-'60s psychedelia. In reality, #6 in December and off an LP so common I was able to pick up a decent copy for just £2.

One song which would eventually become a darling of the psychedelic scene was "You Keep Me Hangin' On", which would be treated to a deliciously sludgy cover by Vanilla Fudge, but in the tail end it's the Supremes original keeping the flag flying for soul. I'm on the side of Jimmy Ruffin's "What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted", one of those big sad songs Motown could do so well, with sentimental strings playing off against those cheerful honks from the brass section. Somehow it all works. Trust me.

The Troggs made their first attempt at a romantic number, scored for rake and garden spade in their inimitable style. "Anyway That You Want Me" doesn't quite come off, it's almost too simple with not enough there to carry it between the big moments. Maybe there was something in the water in December, the Who's "Happy Jack" suffers from similar waiting-for-something-to-happen moments. Perhaps that's why Keith Moon kept trying to join in on the vocals, admonished with an "I saw you!" from Pete Townshend just after the record proper fades out.

There's one last footnote that my sense of historical accuracy wants to place in 1966 because it technically had its first proper hit in a chart for the week ending 3 days before the year is out, and it's that Clapton has finally got all that wanting to play serious blues with serious musicians out of his system after a year or so with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and teamed up with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker to form Cream, arguably the first deliberately architected supergroup: a band where each musician was chosen for possessing an exceptional level of talent in their area, such as Ginger Baker's drumming, Jack Bruce's bass playing or Eric Clapton's being miserable. "I Feel Free" isn't perhaps the greatest demonstration of this concept, being a sort of vaguely Lovin' Spoonfulesque track with a completely unrelated guitar solo bolted on to it in the way the rock'n'roll of ten years earlier would love, but it's a starting point.

Well, "Wrapping Paper" was actually their first single and therefore the real starting point, but it only hit #34 and it's a dreadful lounge act parody so let's try not to think about.

If I sound slightly bored it's because I am, and also I'm itching to talk about 1966's Christmas #1 because it is a treat. Tom Jones' version of "Green, Green Grass Of Home" ended the run of short-lived #1s, topping the charts early in December and spending 7 weeks in that spot. It started out as a country song, and you can still hear a good few hints of that going on, but more than that you hear a demonstration that if you're going to make a capital-B Big single, you get someone with a capital-B Big voice to sing it and go at it all-in with no shame or sense of self-consciousness.

I love it. What a way to close out a great year.