UK Charts: 1967-1971

1967

If you were to ask a suitably large number of people which was the vintage year for the pop charts, there's a decent change your modal value is going to be 1967. At least, it's the one I'd have picked before going into this exercise. There are some sad notes around the characters who brought us the highs of previous years; this is the year where, bereft of commercial success and increasingly losing battle with his demons, Joe Meek murdered his landlady and committed suicide, a tragic final note on such a promising career.

But enough of that. The year makes a case for itself by going straight into its first chart with "Hey Joe" climbing towards its eventual #6. If '67 is the iconic "when charts were great" year then Jimi Hendrix is the iconic "when charts were great" musician. He arrived in London in late 1966 in a series of events one or two degrees of separation from both the Stones and the Animals (see, I told you they were exciting!), with ex-Animals bassist turned producer Chas Chandler convinced a cover of "Hey Joe" would be a viable hit with the right artist.

The killer move here was playing it slow and moody, Hendrix providing swirling guitar textures that disguise the song's lean, spare groove. It's a surprisingly honest recording too, none of the guitar sounds removed much from what you could achieve with a Fender Strat plugged straight into an amp with the volume turned up. Of course the trick here is the sheer amount Hendrix does with it. I don't want to go back through the previous 15 years of singles to check, mainly because many of them are awful and I'd rather not listen to them again, but I swear there's at least half a dozen small things which have never been done before on this one record.

We've also got the first Move single, "Night of Fear". It's surprising how fully-formed the Move were upon arrival, although partly this was Roy Wood, Ace Kefford and Trevor Burton's intentions to start as close to a supergroup as they could assemble for a group of lads in Birmingham with little chart success to their name. It's a very Move single, including the cribbing from the 1812 Overture or, as anyone my age knows it, the QBASIC Gorillas song.

Early Cat Stevens wasn't quite as fully-formed; "Matthew And Son" was his biggest UK hit (#2 February '67) but it's still got a few rough edges that wouldn't be there on later records. It's still energetic and fun though.

Also in the charts is a song every '60s and '70s specialist DJ has to use as a set opener sooner or later, "Let's Spend The Night Together". I think this is about the closest the Stones get to that kind of clap-along territory the Beatles enjoyed, but if I'm mentioning this it's in the context of showing you can do this without being insufferably twee about it. Besides which, the sudden cutaway at 1:40 indicates which direction the Stones would be heading later in '67.

That, then, is the muso case in favour of the charts of 1967 - that you can pick a random chart and it'll be full of Hendrix and the Stones and all those other things you still hear everywhere today, mainly because there are too many people about who'll throw a tantrum if they hear something that was made by a band formed this century.

Time to make the picture a little more complex.

Dethroning "Green, Green Grass of Home" (itself somewhat of a point against the rockist, revisionist history of '67 by being #1 for most of January) was a single which went straight in at the top spot and is a standard bearer for the kind of manufactured pop serious business music people love to decry, "I'm A Believer" by The Monkees. Or rather, by a group of session musicians assembled by music supervisor Don Kirshner, because the Monkees famously didn't play their own instruments.

The interesting part of this being that not only were they capable of playing instruments, if not at first to the standards Kirshner demanded, they were equally frustrated that all of these people played on their records without getting credit. And it's not as if plenty of "real" musicians hadn't benefited from the Wrecking Crew backing them up or Jimmy Page fixing a hopelessly fluffed guitar line. People just had it in for the Monkees because they had a TV show and didn't pretend to be anything other than fun, simple pop.

"Last Train to Clarksville" was their first single in the US but it was held back until later in '67 in the UK. A decision I approve of; it's little more than a competent Beatles tribute, whereas "Believer" is one of those moments of simple, gleeful pop that nevertheless turns out to have a lot of depth to it once you listen properly. Complain you may about all those session musicians in the studio, but if you didn't have them would you have ended up with that fuzzed-out electric piano section or the signature riff on a Vox Continental? Neil Diamond wrote it, and it feels like he spent an awful lot of time figuring out what made the best of the Beatles' mid-'60s output tick, because there's definitely an influence there.

I talked about Big Pop as a driving force in the pop of '66 and if "Green, Green Grass Of Home" was a melding with that and country influences, the same was happening in the opposite direction. Nashville, the epicentre of expensive and overtly produced country, reacted to the simpler and more pared-down sounds coming out of California by creating smooth, sophisticated country pop that would eventually gain the label "countrypolitan". Sandy Posey's "Single Girl" is a good example.

Surprisingly slight for something coming out of the Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra partnership was February #8 "Sugar Town". What we have here is an early example of the use of "sugar" as a nod-and-wink euphemism for LSD, perhaps less overt than The Smoke's "My Friend Jack" but still just as deliberate. Besides, this one got the radio play and the chart position while the Smoke had their tune unceremoniously pulled from market for pushing things a little too far even for 1967. A shame, as it's a great record.

While we're talking Big Pop, I can't pass over one of its leading proponents and also one of the biggest-selling records of 1967, Engelbert Humperdinck with "Release Me". This spent six weeks at number one, was on the charts for pretty much the entire year, and thoroughly demolishes the premise of 1967 as a vintage year for rockism because you can't claim that and then have the Beatles kept off the top of the charts by Engelbert bloody Humperdinck.

If we're looking at this through a lens where rock does not have to consistently win for a chart to be considered good... eh, it's serviceable in that kind of "Template done well" way. 'B' side "Ten Guitars" is by far the better surface of the record, and there's some conjecture it was actually this which contributed to the enduring chart performance.

Then at #8 you've got the Royal Guardsmen with "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron", one in a series of distressingly trivial Snoopy-themed novelty records. Petula Clark has "This Is My Song" which is only one gimmick and a couple of foreign-themed lyrics away from being an irksome '50s-style travel exotica song, and Vince Hill's "Edelweiss", only kept off #1 by Humperdinck and perhaps benefitting from the British public's strange obsession with The Sound Of Music that kept it running for years in some cinemas and the soundtrack album the top selling album of the year in 1965, 1966 and 1968.

I was going to say this is the whole Sound of K-Tel problem of early '66 all over again, but it's worse than that; for all its laziness Sound of K-Tel was at least an attempt to produce something vaguely like the actual pop music of the time, whereas early '67 sees the public determined to buy terrible records like the inconsequential frippery of Sandy Shaw's "Puppet On A String", an undeserved but somehow still massive #1. The answer here is Eurovision, this having won the contest for the UK, although that only raises further questions as to just how bad the competition was and c'mon, it's not like people immediately rushed out to buy "Flying The Flag (For You)" just because they saw it on the telly being performed in front of representatives from other countries. Admittedly, there's the additional small detail 2007's Scooch single didn't win the contest, quite the opposite in fact, which is good because if it had we'd have needed to close down music as a concept and never make any more of it again.

Eurovision aside, early 1967 is a cavalcade of dreadfulness. There's whistling records, there's novelty records, there's bands who should know better putting out records which are far from their best, and about the most you can hope for is something like Nancy and Frank Sinatra's "Somethin' Stupid" which is at least inoffensive. You've peaked too early with "Hey Joe", 1967.

So let us go and find out what supposed saviours of the rockist perspective the Beatles were doing, and why the record-buying public as a whole thought it was good but not quite as good as Engelbert Humperdinck. Yet again we see the boys unable to perform as basic a function of record-making as picking one thing to be an 'A' side and one thing to be a 'B' side, so their entry is either "Penny Lane" or "Strawberry Fields Forever" depending on which way up you hold it. This is why we identify the thing it actually is supposed to be with a nice big bold "A", guys.

"Penny Lane" is one of their better moments of being twee, which is a bit like saying teaspoons are one of the better ways to have your eyeballs forcibly removed against your will, but it is Bad Times in 1967 and I'm taking what I can get. In fairness, the tweeness is consigned mostly to the lyrics, a cloying sugariness which even the occasional nudge-wink smutty joke doesn't rescue. While it's all rather tame, this is at least listenable even given the Beatles' weird obsession for putting military-style trumpets on a record. A low barrier to entry, but one which many singles on this same chart have still somehow failed to clear.

"Strawberry Fields Forever" - now here's the one. Nobody gives Ringo the credit he should get for holding this one together, because it's the loping drumming coming in seemingly whenever it feels like that makes this one for me. There is better psychedelia, there are perhaps not quite enough good ideas to sustain this through four whole minutes, but at least it largely works as something you might conceivably listen to for enjoyment. There's a lovely little guitar line around 40 seconds in and scattered about other places which feels a lot like the work of Harrison.

Still I don't blame the good people of this year for preferring the one which has got "Ten Guitars" on what someone could actually be bothered to identify as a 'B' side, and I'm still not certain whether that's an endorsement of "Ten Guitars" or a damning of the musical tastes of 1967.

With all this in mind, it is a tremendous relief to see a line in my tracking spreadsheet for the Jimi Hendrix Experience and "Purple Haze", entering the charts at the end of March and peaking at #3 in May '66. I was worried that a record I came to so early in my music collecting career would suffer from the same tiredness and over-familiarity I now have with the Beatles, but no. This is still as dynamic and exciting as when I first bought that Hendrix best-of compilation, perhaps more so now I hear it in its proper context.

"Purple Haze" hits hard. From the menacing, discordant guitar that opens it to the psychedelic coda with unintelligible voices babbling underneath it, this is not a record that tries to be approachable. It's mercilessly heavy compared to what went before it - not noisy in the manner of early Stones or Kinks, but a relentless and determined pummelling driven by Mitch Mitchell's drumming. Perhaps that's some of the attraction: it's only for people who get it.

1967 still doesn't shake off its fascination with novelty and bizarrely dated records, but at least from April we start to get more of the recognisable classics, the Turtles' "Happy Together" and second single from the Move "I Can Hear The Grass Grow" among them. The latter supposedly written by locking Roy Wood in a room with a bottle of whisky and telling him he couldn't come out until he had another hit record. I know what you mean Roy, I've certainly hit a point where I'm convinced I can hear the grass grow after polishing off a little too much of a bottle for just one evening.

Another single from around this time which wasn't a huge hit (#20 April '67) but did presage some very important musical movements was "Arnold Layne", by what was still at this point The Pink Floyd. (They dropped the definite article soon afterward). This is the early incarnation of the band including Syd Barrett, and the single is interesting for being both forward and backward-looking musically. The dark bass and bright guitar arpeggios are from that newer, heavier sound, but listen to the little "why can't you see" break and tell me that couldn't have turned up on an Animals record.

Away from edgy and antagonistic sounds we have The Mamas & The Papas returning to the charts with "Dedicated To The One I Love" (#2 May '67), although I say that knowing full well it's not quite as gentle as you possibly remember it. The soft, sparse intro opens up into those huge harmonies, although there are some dark and introspective moments between them.

Jeff Beck's "Hi Ho Silver Lining" was relatively long-lived on the 1967 charts, although only topping out at #14. It thoroughly beat out the version released three days earlier by The Attack. Much as I like flying the flag for the underdog this is the charts making the right decision; Beck's is the better version by far, and the Attack's was not their best single of '67 either with "Created By Clive" far more interesting, although then if we're going down that road The Syn's version captures that shambolic rumbling chorus better in my mind. None of these charted and you can ignore all this as the rantings of a madman unhinged by one too many novelty singles.

1967's continuing fascination with disappointment continues with a near-soundalike recording of a three year old Four Seasons 'B' side, "Silence Is Golden" by The Tremeloes. It's not bad, it's just unnecessary in a world where you already have this song on the other side of "Rag Doll", which you bought back in 1964 because it's great. Somehow it was still one of those inexplicably huge #1s, despite feeling like a Merseybeat record from the same year as its inspiration.

I'm beginning to wonder if Who #4 "Pictures Of Lily" only did as well as it did because the people of 1967 confused it for a novelty song, as it is after all about wanking. As we've seen from the sugar incident and McCartney's four of fish and finger pies in Penny Lane, this kind of nudge-wink reference to sex or drugs was a bit of a theme, with only the Velvet Underground failing to get the memo and writing songs where they openly admitted they were popping out to buy heroin off some bloke.

"If I Were A Rich Man" by Topol: exists. Stop this, people of 1967. And what is it about things from 1964, the year Fiddler on the Roof (from which musical this hails) came out?

Seriously, between this and the Edelweiss nonsense it feels like the most common Christmas present in December '66 was a defective calendar. The Beach Boys released their wholly inconsequential role-flip of a far superior 1963 Crystals single, "Then I Kissed Her" which somehow became a #4. I'd not previously considered that Arthur Conley's question of, "do you like good music?" from June #7 "Sweet Soul Music" might have been a cry borne of desperation, but I'm starting to wonder.

The reality is that something is happening here, and unlike Mr Jones I kind of know what it is. It's something that you won't see on a singles chart from May 1967, but was still a musically important event from that month. The release of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".

The Beatles had been effective album sellers from "A Hard Day's Night", and embraced the idea of the album as a creative form in itself rather than merely a collection of songs with "Rubber Soul" at the end of 1965, but Pepper was the first where the creative statement was so strong that Capitol would not be allowed to muck about with the track listing of the US release to suit what they thought were local tastes. Well, that and the Beatles had made the end of such meddling a stipulation of renewing their contract with EMI.

The other important thing to note about Pepper is two songs it doesn't feature: "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever". And looking back at the high points of this early 1967 chart, there's a common theme: these are either non-album singles, or singles released in advance of the album they would be a part of. The egalitarian marketplace of ideas that had started in 1956 when singles became cheap enough for almost everyone to afford now had the opposite economic problem. If you were really into music, you could afford to buy it an album at a time.

This is certainly something I see reflected in the records I rescued from the sheds and clearout sales of various parents (well, two of them, the normal amount). Huge numbers of singles with the occasional really big hitter album up to the end of '66, then the singles drastically tail off and it's overwhelmingly albums from that point on.

All of this has a knock-on effect on the singles chart. Why buy one song when you can buy a dozen, which you don't have to get up to change every couple of minutes? But if everyone does this, the single you would have bought no longer charts. This means that other than non-album singles and records which are the only good thing on an otherwise duff LP, what's in the charts is put there by people who do not desire or are unable to spend enough to buy an album: occasional purchasers and children. I hate to say either of these groups might not be the fine arbiters of taste we'd like them to be, but there's a reason we've got all these novelty records.

A sensible person might call this a good point to end this exercise. There is a lot of merit in the idea that the charts in their purest form, as a reflection of an entire nation's musical taste, existed for little more than a decade - from "Rock Around The Clock" hitting #1 in December 1955 to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" releasing in May 1967. How can you claim to be exploring the musical journey of your country when the keenest and most dedicated of listeners aren't even buying the format you're tracking?  We could save ourselves an awful lot of pain, disappointment and having to listen to all those Wombles records by just ending things here as a document of a fascinating capsule of music history.

So anyway, here's "Waterloo Sunset".

Fittingly given what I've just been saying about albums, this is one of the last few standalone Kinks singles before they focused most of their efforts on concept albums. You can see the transition from a band who wanted to make a lot of noise to one who wanted to tell whole stories, and the microcosmic slice-of-life drama which drives "Waterloo Sunset" is one of their finest. It's so good it rather overshadows the rest of "Something Else by the Kinks", an album which really is one good single per side collected with a lot of filler.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience were rather bucking this trend by putting out non-album singles at an astonishing rate, "The Wind Cries Mary" joining Hendrix's first two singles in not appearing on UK copies of album "Are You Experienced?" It is exquisite, a slow rocker with inscrutably Dylanesque lyrics. Although it was written as a reconciliation, something Dylan was not wont to do in the mid-'60s. Recorded over the course of a mere 20 minutes or so, which is quite something given how well-put-together and considered the end result feels.

Still, while Hendrix might have been more exciting the singles chart of 1967 really belonged to one man, and that was Engelbert Humperdinck. Or should I say Gerry Dorsey, because he had been trying since the 1950s to launch a career under his given name with what seemed like a setback at every corner, from army conscription to tuberculosis. But the mid-'60s was the point at which he started working with Gordon Mills, also managing Tom Jones, where Mills suggested he take a name with a bit more stage presence. As a Humperdinck, his fortunes changed.

"There Goes My Everything" followed the style of "Green, Green Grass of Home" in being a country standard that was given the glow-up to end all glow-ups, and while not as big as "Release Me" was still playing in that same league. And yet it was kept off the #1 spot by a record you never quite think of as an enormous chart-stormer, Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade Of Pale".

Joining the far more obscure Picadilly Line as a late '60s band who couldn't even spell their own name (it was named after Procol Harun, a cat), the group took the freewheeling psychedelic lyrics of Keith Reid and set them to what could effectively be seen as protozoic progressive rock. Which may seem like a weird thing to say but the classical influences were there right from the start and they would eventually adopt more familiar trappings of prog excess such as recording with a full symphony orchestra.

Some of the credit for this goes to pirate radio, another consistent background presence of the singles chart throughout the mid-1960s, and another thing which would be coming to an end in 1967. For this was the year of the Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act, and while the axe would not properly fall until August its inevitability left many stations in a financially unrecoverable state and several made their final broadcasts long before such activity was ruled illegal.

For all later films and the recovery of John Peel's setlists romanticise it, pirate radio was typically a relentlessly commercial affair. All those images of softly-spoken hippies placing obscurities on the turntables amidst a thick cloud of incense smoke only really happened during the early morning graveyard shifts when no-one cared too much what went on, and daytime playlists had the same intensive Top 40 focus we bemoan of modern radio. Stations still, after all, wanted lots of listeners and the reason they championed singles such as "A Whiter Shade of Pale" is they gave them just that.

(You may also note that if you line these pages up against some of those excerpts from John Peel's Perfumed Garden that even there many of the records featured were not strangers to the chart, and it's only time which has made them feel like obscure picks as well as good ones.)

This is perhaps the breakthrough moment for psychedelic rock, the point where an unknown band could have an enormous global hit with a psychedelic record, even without marketing support in some countries. 1967 is certainly the year in which the number of psychedelic records explodes, with bands openly admitting they cared not for the mind-expanding ethos, it was just the go-to sound to have a hit record with - among them Status Quo, in their pre stadium rock incarnation.

But why pick this and not "Strawberry Fields Forever"? Because "A Whiter Shade of Pale" is much closer to the template of a typical psychedelic record. The Beatles could afford time in the studio to craft a record, and this appears to both benefit and detriment on "Strawberry Fields"; it has so many perfectly placed elements, a huge amount going on, but also the feeling that a few of those ideas could have been left out. That last minute drags an awful lot, as if these were the ideas left on the list and someone said, "well, you've got the studio time and the budget" rather than suggesting there was already a great three-minute single here and it didn't need a bunch of noodling, false-ending nonsense on the end of it.

"Pale" is a bunch of lads bundled into a studio and asked to get something out in a couple of takes, while being challenged that they might have gone a bit too far to make this one a hit. Which is why psych is so intimately bound with the psych obscurity; the next big thing had seemed so unpredictable ever since Decca's inopportune decision to turn down the Beatles that record labels would find any old band with a following, get them to cut a single, and release it in a small local test market to see how it went.

This "record it and see what happens" approach pre-dates the psych boom, and there are plenty of small run beat group singles from '64 on which are great records but failed to excite their test market, ending the band's recording career there. The difference with psych was that of those hundreds of bands crowding into studios to get a scant few minutes of recording time is that every so often, one of them would try something so wildly different and new that it would become a legend to psych collectors everywhere, even if only a few hundred copies were pressed.

A great example is Wimple Winch's "Save My Soul", which did well at the local market stage but bombed on national release, meaning what few copies remain are a £400 investment these days. Not quite the affordable nature we've been associating with the 45 rpm single!

It also indicates a couple of points about what is loosely collected under the term "psychedelic".

First, it was released in June 1966.

Second, it's not really a psychedelic single if we're being strict.

Records with elements of the psychedelic sound turn up as early as 1965 and I don't even need to direct you to obscurities like The Mockingbirds' "You Stole My Love" to demonstrate it; "Heart Full of Soul" mentioned earlier in these pages has that same hard-edged guitar and tinge of darkness to it.

So "Save My Soul" was recorded before "Paperback Writer" b/w "Rain" hit the record shops, although since it's not full of swirling phasers and tape effects there's no lineage we need to undermine there. Instead, it's something midway along the same kind of journey the Beatles took from "A Hard Day's Night" to get to "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds": a beat group who were doing more interesting things than the usual beat groups.

This is freakbeat, and it's the progenitor of British psychedelia in much the same way garage rock is for the harder-edged, more uncontrolled US psychedelia. Defining freakbeat is a bit of an "I knows it when I sees it" affair, but if you're looking at pure beat group stuff with no freak involved it has a tendency toward simple structures, innocent lyrics and an upbeat, major-chord feel. Freakbeat on the other hand likes to pull in prominent minor chords, fuzzed guitars or other processed sounds, out-there vocal performances and lyrics tackling more adult or sophisticated themes than simple boy-meets-girl stories. But it's still distinguished from psychedelic rock proper by faster tempo, guitar-forward sounds, consistently danceable rhythm and a recording that is more as-live than it is studio trickery.

Freakbeat largely drew from and grew with the Rolling Stones and particularly the Yardbirds - if something sounds like someone doing their best to copy notes from "Evil Hearted You" or "Shapes of Things" then it's likely freakbeat you're dealing with. Which is where we do undermine the whole Beatles influence, because while they did indeed take a journey from beat group to something more interesting, they never released a single you could really call freakbeat.

See, there are four main genres making up British psychedelia:

1. Freakbeat.
2. Psychedelic rock: slower and heavier, oft given to found sound experimentation and whimsical lyrics.
3. Raga rock: heavily Indian-influenced rhythms and instrumentation, the kind of thing where you'll hear Ravi Shankar mentioned sooner rather than later.
4. Pastoral pop.

The latter is the other big component of British psychedelia, and unlike the other three an almost uniquely British one. It grew outward from baroque pop, encompassing all that was soft, gentle and wistfully backward-looking. Perhaps it was unease at the white heat of progress which marked the times, but Britain in the '60s seemed to fixate on its past the same way Britain today fixates on some romanticised notion of the '60s: lost childhood innocence, music hall and vaudeville entertainers, and the seemingly ever-present Victoriana that Ray Davies would later mock on the first track of "Arthur".

Even when not looking backward pastoral pop would celebrate what it saw as the simple and mundane: fields, sheep, village greens, even the ice cream man and the paper seller. All with a comforting, occasionally dreamlike quality that eschewed the hard and unwelcoming stylings of freakbeat and psychedelic rock.

Is it hard to work out which one the Beatles fall into when they're writing songs about the streets where they grew up?

In case of any doubt, we can audit "Sgt. Pepper". The title track and its reprise are a mashup of music hall and Victorian military ephemera, although you'd need the cover artwork, cut-out-yourself moustaches and all, to fully underline that connection. "With a Little Help From My Friends" lingers on the simple pleasure of friendship. "Fixing a Hole" is straight-up baroque pop instrumentation. "She's Leaving Home" is a runaway song that sides with the parents, and looks backward within its own story to the sound of yet more emblematic baroque pop - this is the one which most closely reveals the "Pet Sounds" influence at work. "Mr Kite"? Music hall through and through. Ditto "When I'm Sixty Four", which I find a particularly irksome example of a song celebrating the simple and mundane. "Lovely Rita" does the same, although less irritatingly.

"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" fits less evenly. It has a willingness to play with time signatures and flirt with heaviness that doesn't quite fit in pastoral pop, but other than the occasional unexpected minor chord doesn't really have the menace or weight to be full-on psychedelic rock. Maybe it'd be the latter if you pitched it down an octave and got someone rougher than Paul on vocals.

"Getting Better" is a strange midpoint that sits halfway between the beat sound and a heavier rock sound that would emerge later, entirely skipping the freakbeat and psychedelic link between those two. Similar with "Good Morning, Good Morning" which in parts almost sounds like a Roy Wood or Wizzard single. Oddly prescient for 1967. And of course "Within You, Without You" is solidly in the raga rock drawer, the Beatles being both enamoured of and influential in this genre.

Which leaves one song, "A Day In The Life". One which seems almost at odds with the rest of its album, the only overtly 1967 thing about it being its ban from radio airplay for the phrase, "I'd love to turn you on". It's a mini-epic with occasional shades of the kind of sound Procol Harum would adopt by '71 with their orchestral pop records, but really much of that is two big orchestral swells distinct from the rest of the track. There's shades of prog in the multi-part structure, although apart from the final piano chord it's not really consistently avant-garde in the way early prog records would be. And it's got that brilliant Ringo thing of coming in sort of whenever he feels like to do some stuff, then wandering off again.

It's a great track. And surprisingly, took a while to filter through as an influence, although when you spot the same three-act structure in "Bohemian Rhapsody" it becomes a little easier to see where it ended up.

(Let's not mention the Who's fantastic "A Quick One, While He's Away" from 1966 when we're talking about foundational influences for long rock songs with multiple act structures, lest we upset established critical hegemony too much. Even if the section from 7:00 is the most inspired yet ridiculous hack for not being able to afford an actual cello ever.)

And all this to get to a point of saying that pastoral pop and heavier psychedelic rock really started taking off in 1967 in the wake of the success of "Sgt. Pepper" for the former and "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" for the latter, adding to the existing stream of freakbeat to provide the explosion in pyschedelic sounds which would launch untold numbers of future compilations, at varying levels of quality.

There's certainly some classic singles around in mid '67. Traffic's "Paper Sun", The Small Faces with "Here Come The Nice" and the now definite article-less Pink Floyd with definitive psych single "See Emily Play".

Through all of this the British public kept buying records which sounded like they came off a film soundtrack, whether they actually did in the case of July #11 "You Only Live Twice" by Nancy Sinatra, or just sounded like it in the case of Vikki Carr's "It Must Be Him", a French song rewritten into English that hit #2 at the beginning of August. "You Only Live Twice" did in fact manage to live twice, also charting as a somewhat pared-down but also weirder recording with Lee Hazlewood paired with "Jackson". Anita Harris' "Just Loving You" (#6 August '67) splits down the middle between this filmic influence and a more countrypolitan record, although there's not exactly an enormous gap between those two genres.

This is the shock of 1967 for me, that this big orchestral pop and other genres in the wider orbit of easy listening were monstrously huge, as much a part of the chart sound as the summer of love the year is better known for. That said I'm not sure it's all at the same creative peak we saw in '65, which may explain the retrospective downplaying of its importance.

There's also the small detail of the two post-Procol number ones.

"All You Need Is Love" is perhaps the definitive Beatles statement on baroque pop, although the short guitar solo hints at them already thinking about where next to go musically. It was used for the first live global television broadcast, a programme called "Our World". It's one of those moments where the band's tendencies towards simple platitudes and clap-along structures is entirely appropriate, so much so that the song was used again at the end of the "Yellow Submarine" cartoon to deliver the film's eponymous moral message. It works as a single, it does exactly what it's supposed to do, and let's try not to poke too hard at it having another one of those "Strawberry Fields" moments of using the last minute or so just to run down the checklist putting in all the ideas which didn't make it into the three minutes of actual song.

Then three weeks later in the middle of August we have Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)" on that top spot. It's a lovely record, with clear lineage from that welcoming Mamas & Papas California sound, but sneaks in a fair few interesting ideas and even a slight dose of darkness that you might not even notice hearing it in the background on the radio. As tends to happen with the California sound, there are some credits to members of the Wrecking Crew in there.

Cream's "Strange Brew" crops up with a somewhat under the radar #17 in July '67, although this hints that people who liked this sort of thing were saving up for the album it would appear on, "Disraeli Gears" in November, with its day-glo cover artwork and string of great tracks that never sold well as singles, "Sunshine Of Your Love" making a mere #25 when released late in 1968 despite its instant recognisability.

Somewhere in all of this is the Monkees' "Randy Scouse Git", although record buyers of the day would have known it as "Alternate Title" since that phrase was rather more offensive in the UK market than it was in the States. It's unexpectedly Kinks-esque. Speaking of which, Dave Davies released solo track "Death of a Clown", reaching #3 in August, although despite being nominally a solo effort it was co-written with Ray Davies and even turned up as the other good track on album "Something Else By The Kinks". Which only adds to my feeling they were rather struggling for material on that one.

As if this attempt at producing some kind of coherent musical history hasn't already fallen to pieces once more in the weird mix of psychedelia, film soundtracks and utter trash of 1967, we have the emergence of another genre that would produce a fair number of breakthrough records over the next few years. Desmond Dekker & The Aces released "007 (Shanty Town)", the first Jamaican-produced record to break into the UK Top 20 at #14 in August, and behind lyrics that name-check spy and heist films is a prime slice of early reggae, sounding like it was recorded in the cupboard under the stairs the way it should.

I've not even managed to mention all the various soul records charting around this time, and the one I am going to mention has been removed into an entirely different genre: Vanilla Fudge's cover of "You Keep Me Hangin' On" wasn't a huge hit (#19 September '67) but is one of the earliest records with the full "heavy" pyschedelic sound. This trend of playing things harder and heavier would eventually start to drop its psychedelic pretensions and give us bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, although if you listen to something like "April" from the latter the lineage is clear.

Unexpectedly forgotten (except for a namecheck from Half Man Half Biscuit), despite hitting #2 in September, Keith West's "Excerpt From A Teenage Opera" is a fine slice of pastoral pop, including the idiomatic celebration of the mundane with its refrain of "Grocer Jack". With the shift to LPs gathering pace this was originally intended to be a teaser for an album-length project, but internal bickering at EMI left us with only this as a 45 rpm curio and peek at what might have been.

In the wake of the disagreement over My Mind's Eye and arguments with their manager about why the band seemed to be continuously broke, the Small Faces had left Decca and come under the wing of Andrew Loog Oldham at his Immediate record label. More importantly for these pages, they had journeyed away from their brash, straight-up R&B into something rather more freakish. Complete with 1967's de rigeur references to drugs, with "Here Come The Nice" being a thinly-disguised ode to their dealer and August '67's "Itchycoo Park" asking, "what did you do there? I got high!"

This was one of those records that really gelled with me when I first heard it in the mid-'90s. It may have helped that you could draw an obvious lineage between the band's early Immediate releases and the stylings of bands at the slacker fringes of Britpop like Supergrass. And yes, this was the parallel I chose to draw and not the explicit cover by M People.

Speaking of bands on a pilgrimage from R&B to... well, anywhere so long as it's weird, we have the Rolling Stones, releasing a Beatles-style double 'A' side. "We Love You" definitely has more than a hint of Beatlesque "let's see what we can do in the studio" trickery to it, although it's the Stones so adds in a welcome hint of danger. Well, it's also got more than a hint of Beatles: Lennon and McCartney provided backing vocals on the track. "Dandelion" is the somewhat more commercial side of the record, a wonderful little piece of baroque pop with freewheeling psychedelic lyrics that feels almost like the Beach Boys in places.

Even this was perhaps a little too weird for pop purchasers, a mere #8 relatively low by the band's chart-storming standards.

This strange double-A was trailing another situation where all the action would happen on an LP well away from the British singles charts, December's "Their Satanic Majesties Request". For me, one of the best things the Stones ever did, which of course means it's the forgotten stepchild and most people will direct you either backward to "Between The Buttons" or onward to the much more straightforward "Beggar's Banquet". Which is a shame, because "Majesties" manages to both come across as bursting with ideas in the way a good psychedelic LP should, while having the decency to include good songs you might want to listen to like "2000 Man" or "She's A Rainbow".

Let's not try to dwell too much on the similarities between the latter and Love's 1966 track "She Comes In Colors" though.

Maybe as a whole it is a bit overblown and pretentious, overshadowed by and in places slightly derivative of Sgt. Pepper. Indeed, what is "On With The Show" other than someone making a version of "Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite" that doesn't make you want to consider shoving your own ears into a pair of cheese graters and scrubbing vigorously?

(Please don't do this. That's what 'mute' and 'stop' buttons were invented for.)

I don't care if it's pretentious, overblown or indeed derivative. Because what it does happen to be is fun. It's rambling and unfocused in the way the Stones tended to be when given insufficient supervision, but even in the baggiest sections of "Sing This All Together (See What Happens)" you can still feel vaguely like the people involved were actually having a good time rather than trying to conspicuously give the impression they were. And all of this is an irrelevant distraction because we are supposed to be talking about the singles chart circa September 1967, not an album from three months later.

A chart which seemed to belong to one man in 1967: Engelbert Humperdinck. "The Last Waltz" was another one of those massive singles in both sound and chart success: 26 weeks on the chart, and #1 until mid-October. I will give it this: it's very well put together, although perhaps in much the same way that you can make almost anything work as a restaurant dish if you add enough butter.

You may be forgiven for thinking in the midst of this that a record called "Let's Go to San Francisco" by The Flower Pot Men is going to be some horrific TV tie-in novelty record, but that band name is just a coincidence. An offshoot of the Ivy League, you can just about hear something reminiscent of "Funny How Love Can Be" in those harmonies. One might write this off as a discount supermarket's own-brand version of classic descending-scale pastoral psychedelia, in that other than some rather enthusiastic Mellotron usage it is a little generic in between those big swells, but it's lovely all the same.

Another single charting surprisingly low at #8 for a big-hitting band, "Heroes and Villains" is one of my favoured tracks of theirs from this era; it might be merely a more refined version of the fast-slow-fast gimmick underlaying Good Vibrations, but it seems to have a bit more drive to it. That said, it's a bit of an old sound by this point. #8 is probably fair.

If I'm going to be disappointed by a chart position here, it's going to be the #18 for Hendrix's "Burning Of The Midnight Lamp". It would eventually grace an album in 1968, but here as a standalone single it's a concentrated three and a half minutes of ideas. Ideas apparently born from Hendrix's own frustration at being unable to realise other, better ideas for the then-nascent "Axis: Bold As Love" album. Maybe it's a little too weird, introspective and deeply layered for a pop chart?

Either that, or the gap between the Marine Offences Act coming into force on 14th August and Radio 1 launching on 30th September left people so musically adrift they could do nothing other than purchase Engelbert Humperdinck.

Which leads us to the first record to be played on that new radio station, George Martin's "Theme One".

No wait, the first music to be heard after the station officially launched at 7am, "Beefeaters" by the Johnny Dankworth Orchestra from 1964.

Alright, fine. I have to mention "Flowers In The Rain" by The Move sooner or later in this context, and as such it was the first record to be played in full on Radio One after the station's official launch countdown. The logic being that at #2, one slot below Engelbert Humperdinck, it was the most popular record which represented the intended sound of the new station.

Yes, Radio 1 began by deliberately not playing what the biggest number of people actually liked, so if you're still complaining about that now it's time to give up, you've had more than 55 years to get the message.

While it may not have seemed so at the time, the launch of Radio 1 represented yet another ominous tick toward the singles chart becoming the symbol of frippery and inconsequentiality, the music people who didn't like music bought. It was the establishment welcoming pop music, deciding that it was safe. Even from the start self-consciously serious listeners bemoaned the station's musical choices: despite its Humperdinck-shunning start there were grumbles that it pandered too much to a mature and staid audience, and didn't have the edge or even the sheer volume of records played per hour that the old pirate stations had.

With Hendrix joining his peers in becoming an album-focused act and the Summer of Love giving way to rainy evenings (perhaps an influence on October Kinks #3 "Autumn Almanac"?) there's certainly a feeling that the charts had started sounding a lot safer now the natural place for wild excess was the LP.

Diana Ross's "Reflections" is almost too smooth, even if it's got some interesting choices in the instrumentation. I like the raga rock influences on Traffic's "Hole In My Shoe", an October #2, but it's still got that kind of safe feeling which wouldn't leave it out of place in the sagging middle of Sgt. Pepper. I blame the tweeness of the lyrics.

Perhaps this was just a reflection on the British music scene; while some records might tilt at the odd drug reference, an awful lot of home-grown psychedelia revelled in comforting themes of childhood, whimsy and reflections on times past. It's something that would become noticeable in comparison to American psychedelia and its offshoots with increasing US involvement in Vietnam; British groups would be happily going "look what's in my toybox, it's a friendly spider" while stateside bands would underscore things with increasingly obvious subtexts of "people are dying out there".

I mention this here because in amongst all this comparative safety, The Box Tops' "The Letter" stands out with its much gruffer, harder-edged note. Innovative for including a sound sample of a jet passing overhead, although so limited by the recording technology available it may as well have been Joe Meek's toilet.

But to displace "The Last Waltz" from #1 took a band who've become a byword for musical safety, or at least a byword for having a bloody long and successful career: the Bee Gees, with "Massachussetts" all the way back in 1967. They'd already had a minor hit earlier in the year with "New York Mining Disaster 1941", a record which I can probably annoy a lot of people by calling proto-Decemberists, but this was the big one.

"Massachussetts" shows the change in the charts; whereas "Mining Disaster" is weird and hesitant, this is pure caramel in music form, accented by little tinkles of xylophone. This is the first record where the iconic Bee Gees falsetto vocals start coming through, with a lush soundscape of strings to work against.

It does feel poetic that the birth of Radio 1 would be the birth of the out and out pop band (let's just ignore that the Monkees have been around a while), and for me few acts exemplify that more than the Herd. Fronted by Peter Frampton, then a teen hearthrob rather than a talkbox-driven meme and survivor of an unfortunate live-action Sgt. Pepper movie, the band arrived on the chart in late 1967 with their sound fully formed for slow-burning eventual #6, "From The Underworld".

You know what? I like the Herd, and I'm not ashamed of that. Working with Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley (they of Honeycombs association), they knew what they set out to do and they did it well. Frampton may have become disillusioned with being little more than a pin-up who sang nice songs, but these are well-produced and sonically interesting for all they might be rampantly commercial.

This is all conjecture, but one record Radio 1 definitely had a hand in was The Foundations' "Baby Now That I've Found You", reaching #1 in November '67. There was a general effort on the part of the BBC's new station to avoid playing records which were indelibly associated with extensive airplay on pirate radio, and with the Foundations being very much under the radar in late 1967 they fit the bill perfectly.

They were a large, diverse and hardworking group, although I'm not a huge fan of the Motown-via-K-Tel sound; bringing up the spectre of that terrible Sixties compilation once more, the Foundations records were some of those on offer where the ersatz version was very hard to tell from the original.

While all of these bands seemed to be finding their niche in a pop world that was becoming all rather safe and polished, there was one consistent set of chart-toppers who seemed to revel in the silliness and ephemerality of it all. I refer to the tortuously if descriptively named Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. "Zabadak!" was their October attempt on the charts, peaking at #3.

Like the Herd, they relied on the Howard Blaikley partnership for material, but this was the point at which those two decided to stop penning lively beat singles with the occasional foreign influence for the band and go all out wild. "Zabadak!" is utter madness, full of multiple verses fighting each other being sung at the same time, nonsense lyrics, African-influenced percussion and an inevitable false stop. It's pure joy, at once both disposable and clever, and would still be turning up on magazine giveaway EPs late into 1968.

If I wanted to underline my point about the sudden retreat into safety with a recognisable reference I'd point to Val Doonican making an indistinguishable-from-the-'50s entry into the charts (up to #3 no less!) with "If The Whole World Stopped Loving", but that would be easy so let's do it with the late November #1 from Long John Baldry, "Let The Heartaches Begin".

It's fine. It's a pleasurable enough listen, richly instrumented, but this is clearly a record drawing from a year which starts off with "The Green, Green Grass Of Home" and exists in the long shadow of Engelbert Humperdinck. I respect the achievement but I long for the weirdness of "Burning Of The Midnight Lamp" to be a little more, well, present.

Even the Troggs had made their best attempt at scrubbing up clean for "Love Is All Around", although this is the Troggs we're talking about so they've mostly attempted to scrub themselves clean with several rocks and an unfortunate frog which happened to be in the wrong pond at the wrong time. Reg Presley apparently wrote it in a matter of minutes.

Something about this record really works for me. It's so plaintive, so simple, and yet as a result more powerful as a love song than two dozen layers of strings and lyrics an expert writing partnership spent entire days labouring over. Also I was arriving at this from the perspective of the '90s, where we had the most overdone saccharine-laden cover of this dominating our charts for an eternity. The original is just nice in comparison. Plain and honest.

Gene Pitney pops up with another one of those wistful records which just feels rainy, "Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart" and I note with some distaste the Scaffold are present with future advert soundtrack and irritating novelty "Thank U Very Much". Sigh. Really, we had Hendrix at #18 and then we did this?

It's a surprise amongst this that "Daydream Believer" was a bit of a slow burner, and didn't hit its #5 peak until 1968. While there may have been plenty of session musicians present running the rhythm section and filling in the edges, the Monkees did end up playing their own instruments on this. It's one of those near-perfect pop records, from the endearingly faux intro chatter to the perfect tick of a beat that seems designed to be played on a good idler-driven turntable. You know, state of the art for 1967.

Of all the things for the Beatles to finally decide to have a distinct 'A' and 'B' side, it would be "Hello, Goodbye" (backed by off-kilter musical bath thought "I Am The Walrus", definitely the better side). It's perhaps a little inconsequential, but such is the spirit of the age, and you don't see me taking points away from "Zabadak!" here, do you. If anything I feel like it benefits from not having to be An Event in the way which was expected from Beatles singles by this point. It comes in, it does its sunny and happy thing, and gets back out again three minutes later without a massive load of unfortunate noodling.

Well. There is a small load. This really could have ended at two minutes thirty and we'd have lost nothing but some tape that was best left in the dustbin anyway.

Perhaps the most notable comment on 1967 as the year of very big stage acts comes from the year itself. While a ban on BBC airplay due to risqué lyrics (and its general cynicism being at odds with prevailing pop norms) may have contributed to it skulking about at the bottom of the charts with a peak of #22, Scott Walker's first solo record "Jackie", a translated cover of a Jacques Brel original, commented on the shallow joys imagined by a supposed would-be Humperdinck.

But if I am to close out this long and confusing year, it will be with the Four Tops version of "Walk Away Renee". The 1966 Left Banke original is a wonderful slice of baroque pop, but in the super-slick world of December 1967 it's the tightness and perfectly interlocking pieces of the Motown sound which fits in. And Levi Stubbs sells this, it might be slick but it is far from corporate and emotionless.

Walk away 1967. You were not what I expected.

1968

If 1967 was the year in which albums started to come into their own, there's a case to be made that the most album album of the year is "Days Of Future Passed" by The Moody Blues, an overgrown stereo demonstration record which presented itself as a single contiguous work rather than a collection of songs.

It also has the odd distinction for a record which mixes classical-style music with then-contemporary rock for the classical pieces to be the ones which sound dated; they are evocative of a relatively short-lived collection of film soundtrack tropes from the mid-'60s, whereas good progressive rock is timeless. Or at least gathers time at a slower rate.

I feel like the p-word is justified here, too. The integration of classical and rock themes may be a little clumsy, there may not be a preponderance of weird time signatures or unusual instrumentation, but this is a linked suite of songs with plenty of runtimes up above the five minute mark, designed with sonic fidelity and the opportunity to show off your new stereo transcription turntable very much in mind. (This being the whole point of the exercise, Decca wanting something to demonstrate the possibilities of their new Deramic Sound System technology other than the easy listening records which made up most of the launch catalogue).

If you're wondering where all this is going, in January 1968 Deram released a cut-down version of the 7:44 "The Night: Nights In White Satin" on a 45 as "Nights In White Satin". It barely troubled the charts on its first outing, although it would be reissued to greater success in the early '70s.

I want to mention this because "Nights In White Satin" is a great record. It's "reduce people to tears" stuff beautiful when played live, but even if you are above such things it's a wonderfully moody and atmospheric piece with some excellent Mellotron flute going on. I mean, that's several boxes ticked on what I look for in a late '60s record.

I also want to mention it to show the completeness of that schism begun with Sgt. Pepper. This is album music. It's no longer welcome on the pop charts. If you want to sit there with the lights dimmed marvelling at the fidelity with which you can reproduce this, you can do so playing it at 33 and a third.

Contrast this with "Everlasting Love" - credited to the Love Affair, but really that most pop record of things: the band's lead singer Steve Ellis backed by session musicians. This studio switcheroo was done to beat the Robert Knight original to market in the UK, and worked: that version ended up almost unknown, whereas the Love Affair got a #1 and probably a few royalties from it turning up ever since on adverts which want to suggest that people might enjoy the product featured over an extended duration.

This is not a record which slowly builds up in a slow and atmospheric way. It jumps straight in with that first drum fill and is up to speed immediately. It's a record designed to grab your attention at any point - you could hear any 20 second snatch of it and know both what it is and that you'd like to buy a copy of it for further listening.

1968 shows an accessibility returning to pop, a willingness to put out simple and straightforward records like Amen Corner's "Bend Me Shape Me", #3 in February. Noticeably Herd-esque. Perhaps the most noticeable example is Manfred Mann's cover of "The Mighty Quinn", releasing late January and peaking at #1 in February. The original is Bob Dylan's, and it's a spiky, antagonistic record even by his standards. It's less thin wild mercury sound as it is just lamping you in the face with a girder and running away giggling. The vocal performance verges on self-parody, the band's a ramshackle bunch of noise, and it's full of disjointed shouting in the background. This is a record you'd play as someone who Gets It, for other people who Get It.

Manfred Mann take an industrial sander to it and come away with a record that's all smooth edges and gentle curves. There's a hint of the gutter party which is the original, but it's never threatening or unwelcoming. The background shouting is replaced with a softly sung "aaaah". It's Dylan with the difficulty level turned down, and I love it.

What I find odd with 1968 is how little psychedelia made it through to the charts for the sheer volume of it which was still being produced. We do have The Status Quo (still with a definite article at this point) getting to #7 with "Pictures Of Matchstick Men", a record famous for its trippy phaser stylings being at odds with the band's later reputation for two chord stadium rock, but this was overtly a commercial decision on their part, the band confessing themselves to being "about as psychedelic as a pint of beer with the lads". If anything, I wonder if the determination to do something commercially successful propelled it up the charts more than any trappings of psychedelia did.

The Lemon Pipers' "Green Tambourine" is another oddity here, even with the tinges of raga rock it feels like it belongs somewhere in mid-'67. That said, for all the unusual textures it still has that immediacy you expect from a good pop record.

If it's immediacy you want, though, it would be hard to look past the Move's "Fire Brigade", a February single which rose to #3 by mid-March. I have a bit of a soft spot for this one, since in my brief career as a music society DJ specialising in '60s and '70s obscurities this was the first record I put on a setlist and got a reaction of, "seriously, keep going, this is one of the best sets we've had in ages". It's that immediacy, see.

Then there's the Bee Gees song you absolutely know (if only because Boyzone covered it in the '90s), "Words". Reaching #8, it was an instance of the band experimenting with their early sound, running the piano through heavy compression to make it sound bigger. Which is an impression this single gives me; it wants to sound big, even when it doesn't always have the ingredients.

As far as bands finding their definitive sound goes, or perhaps their definitive thing, I can't talk about early 1968 without mentioning the most Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich single ever recorded, "The Legend Of Xanadu". It's a masterpiece. The "Knights Of Cydonia" of its day. I am entirely serious about this, which is probably more than the band were at the time.

For a group who habitually toyed with excess as an unexpected expression of inconsequentiality, this is the point at which they saw a big warning sign saying "TOO MUCH" and reacted to it by flooring the throttle to see what would happen. This is what happens. Either the best or the worst pop record ever made. Possibly both at the same time. It's got whips cracking in the background, mariachi trumpets and about a million other things which simply have no business being anywhere near a circa 1968 pop record on their own, let alone all at once.

The odd thing is that it all works. I may have bemoaned later rock'n'roll as too reliant on gimmicks and loathed nearly every novelty record that came my way, but "Xanadu" is not reliant on gimmicks. There is a great pop record lurking under there, in the same way that theoretically underneath one of those mad Dekotora trucks is a functioning freight vehicle. It's just been... added to. A lot.

I could easily write 10,000 increasingly incoherent words on these three and a half minutes alone, and there's a part of me which feels like making good on this threat, but I think I'll leave it at the same challenge offered by Dylan at his most mercurial: either you Get It, or you Don't. Besides, maybe one day someone will make a nightcore version.

The record-buying public of 1968 certainly got it, and in quite some volume, as it made #1 at the end of March and went certified gold in the same year. It thankfully deposed tedious yodelling oompah nonsense "Cinderella Rockefella" from that top spot, a record which is absolutely relying on gimmickry to carry nothing of worth.

Both entered the charts in the same week as yet another early 1968 #1, Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World". It's a lovely piece of instrumentation with those switches to minor chords all over the place lending it a sort of wistful sadness despite the theoretically upbeat lyrics. Strangely for such a successful record over here, it was the slowest of slow burners in the US, only coming to prominence there in the late '80s thanks to ABC Records' refusal to promote it.

Wistful sadness also washes over Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay", more so when you realise it was released as a posthumous record, the singer having died in a plane crash in December 1967. The record was finished by long-time Redding collaborator and Stax house musician Steve Cropper. He did a great job.

I would love to make a suitably gentle segue away from this point but unfortunately my big spreadsheet of facts tells me that unless I pay Donovan's pastoral "Jennifer Juniper" more attention than I should, the next big single to talk about is Tom Jones' "Delilah".

Yes, my finely-honed sense for "TOO MUCH" is tingling, although I don't think there's quite such a solid foundation to carry this one. Still, it somehow makes mariachi brass work in yet another place where it shouldn't, perhaps by leaning it carefully against the totemic knicker-collecting presence that is Tom Jones at his finest. The boy earns his wages here, I'll give him that.

Right now I'm looking at my own words and telling myself a popular phrase which starts profanely and ends with "off", a situation all too tragically common in these pages, so let's move on very quietly to John Rowles' "If I Only Had Time", #3 in April '68. These days you might call it an ode to ADHD, although let's be honest the real ode to living with ADHD here is "Xanadu".

Entering the charts at the end of March '68 is another pair of eventual #1 singles. One of which is Cliff Richard's "Congratulations", which does not improve with age. It's 1968 and Cliff appears to have just about managed to figure out what it is that makes Adam Faith singles tick. It is yet another Eurovision entry, coming second in the competition, hosted in London thanks to "Puppet On A String" winning the contest the previous year. We do like buying our high-finishing records, a tradition which continues to this day with Sam Ryder's "Space Man" peaking at #2. Maybe one day I'll even get that far in this series.

While this somehow ended up on the turntable at countless parents' parties in the late '80s (although maybe only the ones tame enough to bring kids along to) I do not get any warmth or nostalgia from it. Cliff's main function for me remains being the prototype for the Mark 1 British Elvis and creating the Shadows' solo career by being too tight to pay them properly, and that's where it should have ended

As for the other #1? Oh sods, it's a Beatles single. Written by McCartney.

If you imagine the Beatles at their most inoffensive and clap-along, then imagine them trying to be Bob Dylan, you'd land about where "Lady Madonna" is. That's a little uncharitable of me as it was supposed to be in part a reimagining of Humphrey Lyttelton's "Bad Penny Blues" (#19 July '56) and it does competently achieve that, but overall this is like one of those 1950s recipes where several of the ingredients sound good in isolation but the remainder is "add three jars of mayonnaise and then set in gelatin" and nobody needs that as a part of their evening.

You know what's good and entered the charts in the same week as those two? Reparata and the Delrons' "Captain Of Your Ship". How this ended up as little more than the soundtrack to a rice advert and a sample for a Betty Boo record and I had to listen to "Congratulations" at far too many boring parties is one of the many questions of musical injustice I find myself raising. I guess that #13 in April '68 was indeed unlucky for some.

In the wake of the Monkees started to follow bands who took the idea of simple, unpretentious pop aimed at a young audience and ran with it. There are seminal works in this genre of bubblegum pop to come, but the first big hit was the 1910 Fruitgum Company with "Simon Says" (#2 in May '68). Eh, it's fine. If anything, this may have helped spawn the genre by showing how little effort was needed above making sure something was competent, simple, and relatively catchy.

Although some genres had become more album-focused, easy listening still had plenty of devotees in front of the 45 rpm rack, propelling Andy Williams to #5 with the enduring "Can't Take My Eyes Off You". It's hard to disassociate this from the over-familiarity we have with it as a modern audience, but I like the progression in what Andy Williams was doing 10 years after "Butterfly". It's not challenging fare but it's not designed to be, it's supposed to be smooth and sultry and above all backgroundable, and I think all of those are achieved well here. It just might have gotten overplayed a bit in the '90s.

I'm surprised to get as late as 1968 before mentioning Honeybus, but this is experiencing these bands retrospectively through compilations of obscurities. I may have encountered them first through a rough demo of "Delighted To See You", lyrically very unfortunately so in a post-Yewtree world, and furthered that with the beautifully pastoral "(Do I Figure) In Your Life" but most people in the '60s would have heard them first on April #8 "I Can't Let Maggie Go". Although they would be forgiven for thinking they'd heard that intro before on Chris Farlowe's version of "Handbags and Gladrags" (although it's closer to the later Rod Stewart version).

Before I get into one of those who-copied-who rabbit holes, this was one of those moments where a band refined and improved their sound at just the point where the market was heading in the same direction. Pastoral-tinged but not as lazily sleepy, the band had added just enough energy to capture a market which was very much into softer pop.

Not that anyone had told the Small Faces, unless those soft pop buyers were the neighbours with no room for ravers they complained about in "Lazy Sunday" (#2 May '68, displacing "Simon Says" from a single week in that position). I remember listening to this the first time and spending about a month obsessed with the phrase "doing me crust in", one which has sadly disappeared once more into obscurity. Or possibly I just moved too far away from South London. "Lazy Sunday" is a great single for reasons other than this, although it does sound slightly dated in this company, and even against the other tracks on the "Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake" album. The title track in particular feeling rather more '68.

But yet again I'm talking albums in a place where I said I would concentrate on singles.

If I were to pick my defining sound of early '68, it would be the Howard Blaikley-penned single as realised by a band determined to be defiantly pop. In which service we have a #5 from The Herd, "I Don't Want Our Loving To Die". This is a fantastic slice of pop. Coming in at just under 3 minutes, there is not a single one of those not-quite 180 seconds wasted. It bounces and swings its way through nearly every '60s pop trope worth visiting, from "ba-ba-ba" backing vocals to those wonderful descending scales, all interwoven with an instantly recognisable organ riff. There's even a little bit of mock-Humperdinck going on at 1:35 before diving off into a rather Troggs-esque woodwind solo. I meant it about those '60s pop tropes!

One pop trope that the Herd thankfully avoided is a lyric that later turns out to be unfortunate in a world where we've found out the establishment was (and quite possibly still is) liberally salted with paedophiles. All these records which talk about "my child" or practically slavering over someone who hasn't yet even turned sixteen do not come across well to modern ears. So while Gary Puckett and The Union Gap's "Young Girl" may not have seemed untoward when it topped the charts at the end of May '68, it certainly feels somewhat off listening to it now. At least the singer confesses it's wrong, which plenty of peers didn't!

It's a shame because this is otherwise a well-produced single, reminiscent in many ways of the works of Orbison. I just wish it was about something else. Be like Engelbert Humperdinck, "A Man Without Love". Which for all I've used it as a punchline really isn't bad, accordion break and all. You can see why people kept buying this, giving it 13 weeks on the chart.

I think I might even prefer it to Scott Walker's "Joanna", which reached #7 in June. Shocking, but I think it's a little too slow and relies a little too hard on Walker's vocal to carry a record which doesn't do much else of note.

Besides, things are about to get interesting, in the way the pop charts are wont to do when they start feeling like they've been in a comfortable rut for a little too long. But first, what about the Love Affair singles you most likely haven't heard? "Rainbow Valley" hit #5 in June, with similar session band shenanigans to their first hit and a sound that is instantly recognisable as the band who were pretending to be the band. If Engelbert Humperdinck was the unexpected big seller of 1967, then the Love Affair have a good candidacy for 1968. These days we think of them as a one hit wonder, but as "Rainbow Valley" may hint at they had a string of hits in '68, coming second only to the Beatles that year in 7" sales.

So far, so much the case for '68 being the year of a very safe, very manufactured form of pop.

Prepare your ears in this context for "This Wheel's On Fire", a Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and The Trinity single releasing at the end of April and eventually going to #5 in June. Perhaps another band name with a full complement of comma and ampersand had consumers expecting another Dave Dee, Others & So On situation?

The song was originally an unreleased Bob Dylan number from the frequently-bootlegged Basement Tapes, but whereas most Dylan covers would smooth out the rough edges and cordon off the weird bits this one revels in them, even adding its own with the constant background pulse from that well-used "Three Violins" Mellotron tape bank. It's strange, spiky and psychedelic in a very uncommercial way. Record buyers of 1968, I salute you and your suddenly avant-garde taste.

When discussing these records, it's impossible not to filter them through how I would have first encountered them. Like many of my age, the first time I heard "This Wheel's On Fire" was not on the radio or in a record collection, but the short snatch used as the theme for BBC comedy "Absolutely Fabulous", which Driscoll re-recorded with Ade Edmondson. (Better known as a comedy actor, but himself a musician of note as a founding member of the Bad Shepherds). Finding out this 20 seconds or so was an actual record felt exciting: the small part used for the show was so mysterious, what could three minutes of it be like?

(If I recall correctly, a little disappointing at the time. I was a philistine.)

Ab Fab, as you may now painfully remember it being called, presaged a sort of background fascination with the 1960s that would bubble throughout the '90s, including many covers. I've mentioned the M People doing a version of Itchycoo Park, so divorced from the original it feels like they just needed something to rifle through for lyrics, but another mid '90s cover was Pato Banton's "Baby Come Back". In terms of the kind of musical sacrilege people were committing almost daily in the most tasteless wastelands of 1994 it is fairly inoffensive, but by the early 2000s had become one of those meme records destined to be spun as a constant feature of student union cheese nights. Usually coming up on the setlist at around the point I started questioning to myself exactly why I was here and why had I not gone to a nice quiet pub instead.

All of this is a long route round to a massive #1 in July '68, although first charting in May, "Baby Come Back" by The Equals. In further ignominy it has been K-Tel'd to death on the major streaming platforms, and while the re-recordings are relatively close all of them still seem to rob the song of the energy and immediacy present on the original 45. If you can find a copy, it's a good way to reset all the horrors which have been wrought on the song since. Originally it was a B-side to '66 record "Hold Me Closer", with the '68 hit being a reissue. Either shows the kind of punkish energy and mischief which may have influenced the Clash to cover "Police On My Back", another great Equals record.

If a record from '66 seems a little bit of a throwback, it was nothing compared to the #1 which displaced it. The Template is back. Des O'Connor's "I Pretend" is at the top of the charts. I'm not going to say we're all the way back at 1954 but this is certainly one of those turn-of-the-decade glowed up Template records where they started giving them at least a little bit of bounce. The story is apparently that O'Connor turned up to a studio intending to record a jingle, met Les Reed and asked him for a pop song.

Oddly, "Baby Come Back" was a bit of a slow burner, and "I Pretend" was even slower. First charting after both of them but going to #1 sooner was the Rolling Stones coming back so far from Satanic Majesties they went in the opposite direction. "Jumpin' Jack Flash" is hard-edged and straightforward in a way the Stones hadn't truly been since '64. Against the backdrop of early '68 you can hear it bringing much of the tougher sound of US garage rock which had been largely absent from the UK charts.

Could you count Tommy James & The Shondells' "Mony Mony" (yet another record taking two months to get to #1!) amongst that? They were a band who tended to ride any sound which fit, but this one is definitely on the heavy side.

In terms of jumping on a sound bandwagon, Cupid's Inspiration recorded a cover version of "Yesterday Has Gone" which went to #4 in July and owed more than a little to the Love Affair. That said, there's a little break around 1:50 which is almost pure pastoral pop! Sadly another one which has suffered from too many re-recordings, which are particularly soulless in this instance. Seek out an original 45, or at least someone who's recorded a video where you can see one is clearly the source of the audio.

At #8 in July is one of those songs I remember being obsessed by when I first heard it on the radio early in my dive into '60s music, Manfred Mann's "My Name Is Jack". These days I think it sounds more like the theme for a TV show that never was, whistles and sound effects into the bargain.

If "This Wheel's On Fire" had seemed odd, then 1968 was going to give us another slow-burning #1, and perhaps its weirdest. Not just for the musical content, but being an experimental and unusual track which had an album you could buy it on with other tracks. One side of which was a concept album, no less. I refer to The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown's "Fire". Yes, it has been reduced to a joke by time and every teenage schoolboy has thought it hilarious to announce "I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you..." before sticking something in the Bunsen burner while the teacher isn't looking, but try to put all that to one side and listen to the thing again. It's madness, but madness with a purpose and a driving beat. And if it came down to this or Des O'Connor, which would you take, eh?

In other surprises, how about queuing up a Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass record and hearing not soft brass with a clip-clop beat but a Fender Rhodes electric piano? "This Guy's In Love With You", #3 in August, is a wonderfully soft piece of easy listening mixed with a little big band showmanship. Directly below it and surprisingly similar in places is Dusty Springfield's "I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten", with a vocal line that seems constantly about to trip over itself and a habit of shifting tone and speed in the most endearing way. It's got the charm that all the best of Dusty's records have.

While not a high-profile hit (#21 at peak, although a steady seller with 15 weeks on chart) I couldn't talk about weird things to be on the hit parade without a mention of all 6-and-a-bit minutes of "America" by The Nice. In a world of increasingly wild stage shows, where you had a good chance of seeing Arthur Brown accidentally set fire to himself, The Nice went to an extreme with one in which Keith Emerson would stab his Hammond organ with knives, topple it over, and roll around on the floor with it. Even in the studio you can hear the thing howling in protest for a good minute on this record, perhaps wishing that it could go to a better life where it would be treated with respect, love, and only occasionally be made to play on a Des O'Connor record.

"America" is, and I would say this, brilliant. A wigged-out psych instrumental version of one of the best songs from "West Side Story", played with a level of destructive impulse that makes the Troggs look sedate. It would typically be rendered in even harder and heavier form live, making an already great track even better and serving as an excellent advert for the durability of the Hammond L-100, if not necessarily its stability of tone while being subject to all of this.

July '68 is also the point at which Simon & Garfunkel went from lower rank chart-botherers to something to contend with, the soundtrack to film "The Graduate" perhaps helping their profile and providing them with eventual #4 hit "Mrs Robinson". It's a little rougher-edged and darker than their early, sunnier folk-rock, meeting in the middle with 1968's willingness to buy softer records. "America" and "Fire" excepted.

The Kinks' "Days" (#12 August '68) is yet another example of this softer sound. The band rather swerved commercial success with concept albums such as 1968's "The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society" and 1969's "Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)" but this was not for want of songcraft; some of their best work came at the end of this decade, and it's a pity that for all their warm critical reception the albums didn't sell better.

If nothing else, "Days" is better remembered today than many better-selling records. Does anybody still listen to the Beach Boys' "Do It Again", a massive #1 from about the same time? It's a weird melange of backward-looking references to their own records and other hits from when surf was big, so it's excusable not to. Even Herman's Hermits did better in the charts at #8 with the utterly inconsequential "Sunshine Girl".

While "Fire" drew heavily from psychedelic soul, Sly and The Family Stone brought the real deal to the British charts with August #7 "Dance To The Music" with a heavy dose of upfront funk and those delightfully squelchy instruments which mark out late '60s and '70s soul from the brassier, sharper sounds of earlier in the decade.

At #8 in September was Canned Heat's "On The Road Again", a song whose raga rock and guitar harmonic intro perhaps promises more than the laid-back blues it ends up delivering. Still, for all I might complain it's a little too relaxed this is a long way on from how we started 1968; again, this is the more measured and downbeat sound of Vietnam-era USA making its mark on the other side of the Atlantic.

If there's something I find noticeable about these charts going into the tail end of '68, it's how much they're starting to presage the sounds of the 1970s. Like Bee Gees #1 of September, "I've Gotta Get A Message To You". You could have told me this came from 1973 and I wouldn't have made the slightest challenge. It sounds like a much later record than it is. This is contemporary with Status Quo's "Ice In The Sun" (#8 October '68)! Which is a fun pyschedelic pop romp but c'mon, you're not placing that one anywhere outside the 1960s when you listen to it.

(Well, unless you mistakenly identify it as a Dukes of Stratosphear song)

This is a chart of laid-back records, such as Aretha Franklin's cover of "I Say a Little Prayer" (#4 September '68). Or Mama Cass of And Papas fame with "Dream A Little Dream Of Me", a song that sounds spare and haunting even with its layered instrumentation and ragtime piano. Must be that apprehensive vocal.

These are both well-known, but at #2 in October was "Jesamine" by The Casuals. I'm calling this one out because I like it. Well, that and it's a good example of how British pastoral and baroque pop was growing into something else; while this might not seem like it owes much to either this is the progression acts in those scenes took from 1967 into the '70s.

"Jesamine" aside, I'm surprised by how much of this small period of late '68 is full of songs well-known today. Entering the chart in September we have Mason Williams with "Classical Gas" (and our old friends the Wrecking Crew in the background!). It still torments practicing guitarists today.

But if we want the approval stamp on this slower, more considered late '60s sound we must turn to the ultimate reflectors and concentrators of the culture surrounding them, The Beatles. "Hey Jude" (#1 September '68) is that stamp. It also lasts an utterly ridiculous 7 minutes on vinyl, or a minimum of 16-19 years when played live. It is said that the eventual heat death of the universe will be accompanied by Paul McCartney on the piano going "na-na-na" at a gig he started playing in 2004. If you thought the minute or so of discardable ideas at the end of most post-'66 Beatles records was something best left in the editing room bin, "Hey Jude" is a yawning eternity of boredom. Why will it not end? Will time even have meaning when this record finishes? At the very least, you should check if you need to adjust your watch for daylight savings time once the near-interminable fade out starts crossing the threshold of inaudibility.

Despite this, it's pleasant in parts, especially if you have something else to distract you. "Hey Jude" is an ideal film soundtrack song, cut in and out as required, or perhaps left running into the credits as encouragement for everyone to get up and go outdoors so the staff can clean the theatre. Indeed, Mark Mothersbaugh used an instrumental version of it to great effect at the start of the Royal Tenenbaums, where your attention is mainly focused on the story and not why this record has not ended yet.

Also even the full version of his Mutato Muzika Orchestra cover is only five and a half minutes long. That's practically merciful in comparison.

However, "Hey Jude" was eclipsed in sales by a record from the Beatles' own Apple Records label, Mary Hopkin's "Those Were The Days". Produced by Paul McCartney, those strings feel very familiar in an "Eleanor Rigby" sort of way and there's some sort of brass band nonsense which pines for Sgt. Pepper. Overall I dare say it's better at doing that sort of film-soundtracky, marching band beat stuff than the Beatles' own records, Richard Hewson's arrangement offering just enough intrigue to keep things going.

I'm not sure I'd listen to it for pleasure, but at least it's not twee and cloying. You get a pass for buying this, 1968.

Entering the charts the week after was Hugo Montenegro's version of the theme to "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly", it of the instantly recognisable whistling and "wah-wah-waah" sound. You'll know it when you hear it. I'm still not entirely certain why you'd buy a record of it, and certainly not why enough people would buy copies for it to be yet another 1968 #1 (November in this case, there was a queue by this point) but there are at least some nice touches, and the stark guitar lines almost put me in mind of "Boots"-era Nancy Sinatra in places.

It is at this point that the 1960s most overrated lounge band The Doors enter the scene with a record appropriately titled "Hello I Love You", peaking at #15 in October. If it sounds like I unfairly have it in for The Doors from my opening sentence that is because I unfairly have it in for The Doors and I want to make that clear from the start. I am supposed to like them, I don't, and this angers me. I used to like them at one point but then I also liked "Yellow Submarine" at one point and I think I have the same problem with the entrance and exit equipment boys as I do with the fab four: the complete and total lack of danger.

Jim Morrison is supposed to be danger incarnate. Unpredictable, wild, and frequently naked from the waist up. So why does this rarely come across on their records? "Hello I Love You" sounds like a grinning bloke with a Stylophone and even the fans say it's not supposed to be representative, but I have this problem consistently. It all sounds so controlled, like everything in the studio was measured and calculated and there was zero rebellion anywhere. Like a lounge act playing punk songs or an elevator music version of The Stones.

I think the problem is they were just too competent. I cannot fault what they do on a technical level. Ray Manzarek was great at keyboards. Robby Krieger doesn't have standout solos or anything but I find little to quibble with there. John Densmore's drumming is another case of getting the job done with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of musicianship.

This just doesn't work in the context of a 1960s rock band, especially a psychedelic one. Give me someone whose interaction with the microphone is a series of strange yelps and growls. Give me someone who doesn't even know how many strings a guitar should have. Give me someone who thinks an essential part of playing a keyboard instrument is stabbing it. Give me someone whose main contribution is to turn up and go, "hey, I've got this cool jug thing that makes weird sounds". All of these things give you a sound that feels out of control, dangerous, like the musicians are communing with some primeval force which should not be tangled with lightly.

The Doors just sound competent and boring. I'm sorry. I want to like them, and yet I cannot within my framework of reference for this music. I feel like they'd genuinely be a better band reeling off fun pop songs from the pens of Howard Blaikley. At least the Herd didn't pretend to be anything else.

The case is not helped by one of their better songs, "Light My Fire", not even charting in its original version until the '90s. I say better, but it's really one good organ intro, a lot of pointless noodling and a few verses that other than the word "higher" wouldn't sound out of place on an Andy Williams record. Even on the full seven minute album version the instrumental bits are just boring; compare how restrained they are against the Hammond-wrestling lunacy that is "America".

At which point I introduce that the reason Doors songs from circa '66 are charting in the UK in late '68 is José Feliciano's cover of "Light My Fire" (#6 November '68). It's all acoustic guitar and soft strings, and there's a part of me which is genuinely tempted to say I prefer it because at least this one is honest. It's not trying to wrap up competent lounge music in some misappropriated sense of danger because the frontman might do anything at any point when it gets played live, it's content to fill the gap between those vocals with gentle guitar flourishes and repetitions of the chorus which wouldn't feel out of place on the terrace of an upscale cocktail bar in summer.

If there's one thing I'm noticing about 1968, it's the ridiculous number of #1 records: 21 of the things, a rate of almost one per fortnight. With such competition for the top spot many took a while to get there, with 1-2 months from chart entry to taking the prize being common. Such as October '68 entry and November chart-topper, Joe Cocker's "With A Little Help From My Friends". The first minute could pass as Vanilla Fudge, but then we're into those soul-influenced backing vocals and we are off. If you start picking out influences it's almost a sampling of the best of 1967, but that relentlessly heavy sound is pure '68, as is that extended runtime.

It was definitely produced with a little help from Joe's friends: there's Jimmy Page on guitar, Procol Harum's drummer on the skins, and a session musician named Tommy Eyre behind that Fudge-echoing organ. A name we may well hear again. The following year it would become a Woodstock anthem, being both thematically and musically appropriate. We've come a long way since those entirely pointless covers of "Michelle".

Way down below it at #14 we have Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich fading from the charts with "Wreck Of The Antoinette". It's a good, fun romp but sits in an awkward place of feeling somewhat dated while not being simple and upbeat enough to fit in with the nascent genre of pure bubblegum pop. Perhaps this style was reaching its natural end; the Herd had been split apart by Peter Frampton getting fed up of not being taken seriously and leaving to form Humble Pie along with Steve Marriott of the Small Faces, the remainder of the band lurching along through a series of sporadic flop singles and disbanding in 1969, save for a 1971 reunion few even noticed or cared about.

Although maybe the "TOO MUCH" single had one last gasp left in it: Barry Ryan went to #2 in November with "Eloise", sitting somewhere in a gap between Delilah-style excess and Xanadu-style excess that I didn't realise existed, let alone needed filling. It's nearly six minutes of over-the-top joy, although I might suggest that taken all in one piece that makes for a bit of an exhausting listen.

Somehow the record-purchasing public noticed they'd passed over the thoroughly excellent "This Old Heart Of Mine (Is Weak For You)" back on its original release in '66, propelling a reissue of this Isley Brothers record to #3 in November. In the aftermath of psychedelic soul and the rest of '68 this feels very much from quite a while, but then Motown had the ability to keep going on doing their thing, with soul listeners a relatively loyal bunch. I don't blame them; it's good music.

If '68 is the year where the charts start to assemble the classic Vietnam-era soundtrack, then there can be no record more emblematic of that than the Jimi Hendrix cover of "All Along The Watchtower", #5 early in December '68. It's a cover of a dense and impenetrable Dylan song from 1967's "John Wesley Harding" album, and is surprisingly faithful if you compare the two. What Hendrix adds is this sense of relentless drive, a prowling menace which keeps the record going across its sparse guitar slides and Dylanesque talk-through verses. It's all lean and spare and foreboding, and you can see why so many films stick it on their soundtrack when they want to put across that sense something bad is about to happen.

A different form of cynicism is present in late November #7 "Elenore" by The Turtles, an attempt to mock the apparent laziness with which a bubblegum pop single could be put together. Yes, those "gee I think you're swell" and "et cetera"s in the lyrics are deliberate, a two fingers stuck up at their record company asking for another triviality. There's also some early use of a Moog synthesiser creeping in around 1:07, that unmistakable wobbly science-fiction sound doing its wobbly science-fiction thing in the background for a few seconds.

For a year with an awful lot of number 1s, many of them very good, 1968 somehow found space to put unnecessarily shouty novelty "Lily The Pink" in that spot for the second half of December, a record which comes across as desperate to convince you it's drunk. I don't think I'd enjoy it even if I was. #5 "I'm The Urban Spaceman" was the better novelty, the Bonzo Dog Band moving on from pure music hall routine to something more approximating a pop song. If you think that parping bass sounds a bit like the Beatles then it should be no surprise to learn Paul McCartney produced this one under a pseudonym. The man certainly got around given reaching the end of "Hey Jude" must have taken up most of his year.

Also frustratingly inconsequential is Lulu's December #9, "I'm A Tiger", a record sounding entirely unlike the output of a tiger, whether metaphorical or literal. Let's all sigh and move on. Another record which seems to suffer more than most from being K-Tel'd is The Foundations' "Build Me Up Buttercup", which hit #2 right at the end of the year. The proper version has a vocal constantly on the edge of breaking up, a lovely prominent organ line and a surprisingly trebly sound, while later re-recordings are so smoothed-out they'd send you to sleep.

Love Sculpture's "Sabre Dance" (you'll recognise it once you hear it!) is a #5 on that end-of-year chart, and sits awkwardly between that heavy '68 sound and the sudden explosion of year-ending novelty. John Peel loved it, and his twice-in-one-show radio exposure may have helped, but I think the band could do better such as obscurity "In The Land Of The Few".

December '68 gives us Dusty Springfield's "Son-of-a Preacher Man", a song I could have sworn was intended for Aretha Franklin even before I found out that was indeed the case. Dusty carries this one in style, even if it is a little more swing and groove and a little less big statement piece.

Yet another old Motown single released in December, hitting #3 in January. In the case of Stevie Wonder's "For Once In My Life" it was Motown holding back the '67 recording as they weren't happy with the quality. An odd decision as it's a lovely record with great harmonica lines and intricate bass, but maybe it wasn't quite in the house style.

If "With A Little Help From My Friends" is an example of everything that can go right with a Beatles cover, then Marmalade's "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da" is not. First, let's start with poor source material: the Beatles declined to release this as a single in the UK, and even in the markets where it was released it was backed with the far superior "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", on which Eric Clapton famously overdubbed some bits.

This sparked a race to record a version for the home market much like "Michelle", and the winner of said race was The Marmalade. Their first single had been near-perfect psych obscurity "I See The Rain" all the way back in '67, which did the natural thing expected of psych obscurities and flopped in the UK, although it was a hit in the Netherlands. The band reacted in a way many psych bands did, by making their sound much more commercial. "Lovin' Things" reached #6 in July '68, cribbing heavily from the Love Affair book. Then they won that race to cover "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", possibly by not taking any time to check what they were covering.

It's one of those horribly twee McCartney-penned things where the band found something interesting on their travels and proceeded to sanitise any semblance of interest out of it. Seriously, if you can listen to the excitement that is a contemporary reggae record (random sampling: The Pioneers' "No Dope Me Pony") and the main thing you take away is you could make one hell of a clap-along song with that rhythm, there's no hope. Not those off-beat upward guitar chips, not the way the basslines bury their way into your head until you can't avoid nodding to the beat, not even the vague feeling all of this has been recorded in a cupboard under the stairs, just one rhythm and a bit of call-and-response stage show that you think'll have even the grannies smiling along.

In this context the Marmalade cover is at least competent, in that they haven't made it any worse. (You'll have to find the K-Tel-esque rerecorded version for that!) If anything it's marginally less twee than the original, give or take some unfortunate impersonations of a Jamaican accent. In one sense you can't criticise the band for making the best of a commercial opportunity, and this was certainly the most successful Beatles cover of its day (going to #1 along the way), but it's so... unnecessary. The original barely deserves inclusion on the already rather rambling and bloated White Album, let alone multiple covers of it and so many people inexplicably buying it.

If 1968 was the point at which the '60s charts started seriously predicting the sound of the '70s, this is the point at which it predicts that decade's fascination with buying utterly awful records.

It feels bad to leave things there for the year, so I'm going to bring up the late '68 instrumental I didn't mention when I talked about "Sabre Dance". Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross". This was apparently Peter Green making an updated version of Santo & Johnny's "Sleep Walk", and that dreamy late '50s instrumental fitted perfectly into the musical mores of late 1968. Almost unreasonably slow, it lets those few prominent guitar notes wash over you - no gimmicks, no effects, just a Fender Strat and an amp.

The atypical inclusion of this early track on later compilation albums which mostly concentrated on the post-'74 Buckingham/Nicks line-up highlights something which surprised me about the charts of '68: they are so instantly recognisable. For all 1967 gets touted as the vintage year of this decade it's really the lead into it and the lead out of it which have the fantastic charts full of records which still endure today, with the actual year itself being a curious mess of forgotten also-rans and Engelbert Humperdinck.

And yet we still haven't got to the year of this decade where the pop charts go fully into overdrive, with an implausible number of ideas all happening at the same time.

1969

I used to have this theory, hypothesised around 2003 or so, that the end of a decade sparked a peculiar rush in musical creativity. That if you were to consider a decade, its dominant sound would be firmly established around '_5-'_6,  then some interesting new sound would emerge in '_7, be refined and perfected in '_8 and '_9, before suddenly being scattered to the winds at the turn of the next decade leaving '_0, '_1 and '_2 a strange musical no man's land of unformed ideas before one could take hold in '_3 and become the dominant sound again.

My frame of reference for this was, in descending order of importance, the popular perceptions of punk (surging in from '77, seminal works delivered circa '79, over by '81), psychedelia (massive in '67, missing by '71), post-Britpop indie (from OK Computer landing in '97 to the genre disintegrating into landfill indie), early rock'n'roll ('57-'61) and perhaps most tenuously first-wave Pixies style alternative rock ('87-'91).

This only succeeds by picking genres which happened to land around the turn of the decade and being very selective with what records you included in them. Psych really begins with the freakbeat boom of '65. Alternative rock is a long smear connecting college rock and grunge spread across most of the '80s and early '90s. What I thought of as the great new indie sound of '97 was really just a deluded young man grasping at the dying spasms of Britpop. Rock'n'roll was dead almost on arrival, thanks to its failure to innovate. And underneath it all, if I've taken one thing away from these pages, is the Template and its stubborn refusal to die.

Where I'm going with this is that these nice, neat categorisations and attempts to project regular repeating themes on pop music just don't work. We try to retrospectively neaten them with simple-to-understand stories like 1967's Summer Of Love, but in reality psychedelic rock was going toe to toe with Engelbert Humperdinck and as I've explained at length wasn't necessarily even psychedelic rock to begin with. It's a mess, a glorious mess in which some genres last little more than a few weeks, while others stick around for decades. Ideas which surface, fade, and get safely pronounced dead only to return the following month.

Pop music is messy. And if I am to say one thing before diving into 1969, this is a very messy year even by normal chart standards.

First big single of the year is Manfred Mann's "Fox On The Run". Which is using my chart-based metrics to cheat things a little, since it was released at the end of November '68 and took several weeks even to enter the chart, which it did at #44 in December '68. However, in my iconoclastic way I only consider the Top 40 to be "the chart", so for me this is a January '69 entry and I feel I've distracted from a good record with a lot of pointless statistical noodling. In some lights you could consider this as the sound baroque pop had evolved into by 1969, although a little more up-tempo. At any rate, it's better than a lot of more well-known Manfreds tracks.

Also entering my Top 40 subset in January '69 was defiant cribber from the James Bond theme "Blackberry Way", by The Move. Another late '68 recording which took a while to get going, this was the band's biggest seller (#1 February '69) although for me it's all about the B-side "Something", one of my favourite records of all time and a definite candidate for me wearing out my copy and needing to buy another one. Those drums!

The Move unfortunately seemed to be slowly falling apart by this point, with Ace Kefford sacked for a variety of supposed grievances from drug usage to not getting on with anybody, and Trevor Burton leaving after Blackberry Way reaching #1 left him unable to ignore his frustration that the band was becoming too commercial. Also the small matter of an on-stage bust-up. Roy Wood had invited Jeff Lynne to join around this point, but the latter was busy making great music and little commercial impact with the Idle Race.

1969 is also the year where reggae starts properly entering the charts. Johnny Nash took "You Got Soul" to #6 in February, an odd but charming collision between the rumbling bass and low fidelity of late '60s reggae, and the string-soaked recording island producers would learn that UK market buyers loved in the '70s. (Reggae records would sometimes be released in a fancied-up version with strings and overdubs for the UK, with a rawer stripped-back version for the home market in Jamaica).

Despite recording in Jamaica for a Jamaican record label (one he was co-owner of, no less), Nash was American, hailing from Houston. Which made him one of the first non-Jamaican artists to record in that country.

Motown seemed to have a thing for re-releasing their old records at an opportune moment, with both 1964's "Dancing In The Street" and 1966 Isley Brothers cut "I Guess I'll Always Love You" seeing their biggest chart success in February '69 (#4 and #12 respectively). Also in soul Wilson Pickett released a cover of "Hey Jude", another late '68 slow burner that only troubled the charts this year, although only as high as #16 in February.

I mention it because it has the decency to end, although it's notable that even on a mere 4-minute version it needs a fair amount of padding to hit the runtime. During which padding the initially restrained guitar goes wild into a very flashy solo. It was played by Duane Allman, who would go on to greater fame in the '70s, especially with anyone who's ever watched long-running BBC motoring magazine show Top Gear.

I'm getting a little worried I've spent most of my 1969 heading talking about records from 1968, perhaps a sign how busy that year was. Thankfully Amen Corner's "(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice" has the decency to be from the year it's a hit in (#1 February '69), although they did reissue it in 1976. Well, almost. It's a cover of an Italian original from 1968. Thanks to that reissue I always thought this was a later song, although if you pick up that organ running underneath the mix that should place it firmly in the late '60s.

It was displaced from #1 by a record I never really think of as being a chart-topping hit, Peter Sarstedt's "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)". With shades of a slower, more wistful "Play With Fire" it's a serenade to a long-lost love from a humble background. Rumour has it the lyrics are about Sophia Loren, but Sarstedt was adamant that any similarity was a coincidence. Whoever it's about, I do like it, and am also thankful to it for indirectly introducing me to the Jacobites (via the Dave Kusworth group) on a slow day I spent searching for cover versions of things.

Somehow after all of this, all of the heavy organ sound and the fantastic Dylan covers and the rise and fall of late period Howard Blaikley pop, the Template (fast variant) is still there with Dean Martin's "Gentle On My Mind" spending 20 weeks on the top 40, peaking at #2 in April '69. I'm numb to it now. It wouldn't surprise me if I'm still finding these popping up every so often in the charts come 2020, if I ever get that far.

As I have said before, it's really the spawn of the Template which is the interesting and oft unfairly-derided genre. Engelbert Humperdinck's easy listening #3 hit "The Way It Used To Be" is a bit self-descriptive, sounding like it wouldn't be out of place in '66. Apt, because my first reaction was that this sounds a lot like a less good "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me". And a less good "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" is still a pretty reasonable record.

One of the most influential songs on easy listening, although recorded by an artist who is technically country, is Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman", #7 March '69. Critics call it genre-defying, probably because they don't want to admit an easy listening record is actually good. Yes, it's a little sugary, but it's supposed to be the musical equivalent of a really sumptuous dessert.

Unavailability of the recently recorded Dionne Warwick version sent the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" back into the charts (up to #12 in March), complete with competition from Cilla Black. Although "Surround Yourself With Sorrow" is a perfectly competent Dusty-lite piece of pop music rather than an affront to humanity. It peaked at #3 in April. I am unexpectedly fine with this.

Besides, I'm going to reserve my ire for Lulu's "Boom Bang-A-Bang" (#2 April '69), a record which is both awful and won Eurovision. Unfortunately, only one of those things had any bearing on its chart performance. I'm not au fait with the entries of the 1969 contest but I'm assuming at least half of them must have told the judges to get bent in their native language of choice and slunk off round the corner to a convenient tapas bar. The fact so many countries (four of them!) tied for first place that the competition ran out of medals to award suggests this was not a year where picking an obvious winner or even a song that was vaguely good was an easy task.

Keeping it from #1 was Marvin Gaye classic, "I Heard It Through The Grapevine". This is yet another Motown holdback, originally recorded early in 1967 and a 1968 single in the US thanks to radio airplay in the wake of its inclusion on Gaye's "In The Groove" album. Motown seemingly got just about everyone on their roster to have a crack at this, before deciding the Gladys Knight & The Pips version should be one to go out in the US. It is more of the signature Motown sound and it was still a chart-topper on that side of the Atlantic, but listen to the lean and moody Gaye version and you start to worry about all those bad calls Berry Gordy was making on what made it into record shops.

A surprisingly powerful record is Elvis Presley's response to the Martin Luther King assassination, "If I Can Dream". Despite being weighed down with inappropriate easy listening trappings and too much glitter, the raw emotion in Elvis' voice comes through to save this. It's quite affecting, at least until the somewhat overwrought "right now" of the ending. #11 in March '69, thankfully one place higher than Cliff Richard's attempt to produce a second "Congratulations" with "Good Times (Better Times)" managed in April. I never heard that one on the turntables of people my parents' age in the 1980s, put it that way.

The Love Affair were still kind of there with March #16 "One Road", although not quite up at their highs of early '68. This one may illustrate the pitfalls of relying so much on session musicians for the 'A' sides; is this even recognisably the same band? The other members were starting to feel frustrated with this situation of being little more than something to be screamed at while playing live and cheap providers of 'B' sides. It's a nice-sounding record, but anybody could have made it.

Desmond Dekker was the musician namechecked on "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and listening to "Israelites" you can perhaps hear what attracted McCartney to the sound. Which is my way of saying that while it has some enjoyable elements and a pleasingly grumbly rhythm section, there's a nagging doubt that the reason it hit #1 in April '69 is the unpleasant whiff of novelty to it. Also, I grew up in the '80s in the United Kingdom, I cannot listen to this without on some subconscious level wanting to buy and consume a big circular tub of margarine.

A slow-burning entry to the Top 40 in the same week as "Israelites" was the reissue of 1963 commercial failure, Bob & Earl's "Harlem Shuffle" (eventual #7 May '69). I challenge anyone my age to start playing this and not immediately think "Jump Around" by House of Pain; it's one of those instantly recognisable samples. I do start to wonder if one of the musical threads of 1969 is checking off records missed earlier in the decade!

The Who don't get quite enough credit in my mind for the sheer number of concept albums and early attempts at rock opera they made through the '60s, but the one they do get the recognition for is "Tommy". The one song everyone knows from it, "Pinball Wizard", went to #4 in May '69. For me it's a culmination of ideas the Who did more interestingly in their earlier and less well-formed incarnations, but that didn't stop me enjoying it the first time I heard it.

(Speaking of earlier incarnations, I hope that "supple wrist" isn't a sly reference to "Pictures Of Lily")

At #2 in June '69 is the wonderfully soft and pastoral "Man of the World" from Fleetwood Mac. Strangely ahead of its time in places and of its time in others, I'm disappointed this doesn't get heard as often as their later work. Perhaps we could pretend it's an album track from a forgotten mid '90s indie band. Y'know, one of the good ones. It really does sound like that in places!

While I use these peak chart positions as a way to illustrate how these songs performed, there's a different metric which drives their inclusion in the shortlist - my notion of "bigness", as explained in painful depth many thousands of words ago. This is a formula which considers weeks on chart and average chart position against what was normal for a record of that year (because it changes as the charts change!) to identify those records which dominated popular culture for what felt like weeks on end.

This was really a '90s thing, a decade of sluggish charts and near-blanket marketing which gave us our "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You"s and our "Killing Me Softly"s. In the entire decade of the 1960s there are just four. One of which is "She Loves You", a song which had such an impact we named an entire mania after the band who recorded it.

The oddest, though, is a record which never peaked above #5, one of only a handful of these huge records to do so, but held the record for number of weeks in the Top 40 until counting streaming ruined everything and put all the Christmas records in there near-constantly, with a whopping 75 weeks of being in the 40 best-selling physical singles in the country, albeit non-contiguous with its original run dropping in and out of the charts from 1969 until 1971.

I refer to Frank Sinatra's "My Way". A record etched on public consciousness for ever more, although I suspect I've heard the Sid Vicious version more often than the original. You know what I'm thinking as I listen to it without the sneers and swearing? The rhythm plods. There are strings. It is knowingly French in its influences. We build slowly but inevitably to a crescendo. A 1969 record that would sell enough copies to still be in the Top 40 two years after its release and you know what it is? It's the Template. Not even the altered fast Template or the rock-influenced energetic Template, but the proper unadulterated "Here In My Heart" Template from all the way back in 1952.

This thing really isn't going away, is it?

In things which are going away, at the end of 1966 I introduced you to supergroup Cream, who recorded relatively straightforward "I Feel Free" and some other song best discarded along with the wrapping paper it came in. They went off to record three albums and never overly trouble the charts with 45 rpm success: 1967's "Disraeli Gears", 1968's double LP "Wheels of Fire" comprised of one studio disc and one live disc with but four extended jams using up the entire running time, and 1969's part-live farewell album "Goodbye".

"White Room" stumbled its way to #28 early in 1969, but it's "Badge" that ended the run of Cream singles in the UK with a #18 in May '69. If it sounds like it has more than a few Beatles influences that's because George Harrison helped write it, Eric Clapton not having begun his contribution to "Goodbye" before that point. Ringo Starr supposedly helped by coming up with the line about swans in the park while drunk, adding to his fine history of just stumbling in midway through and making a surprisingly worthwhile contribution.

The Beatles were also heading into that long 1969 comedown which would eventually see the band split up after beginning the year with one final rooftop concert above the Abbey Road studios. I'm sorry if this is a bit of a spoiler. This drawing to an end seemed to unlock something within the band, as if they subconsciously realised what they were recording would be their final creative statements and perhaps it might be a good idea if they were not hopelessly twee with a childish bouncing bass line.

"Get Back", featuring Billy Preston on the electric piano, may not be their greatest or most innovative but does feel like a genuine attempt to make something in the spirit of its time. There's still something a little bit off and at-odds with it compared to other records, you don't exactly have that heavy organ-led sound going on or anything, but it's also not so repellently Beatley in the way so many of their later singles were. Although I can't deny even the finished product sounds like the undirected studio jam it grew out of. It's probably bordering on redundant at this point for me to mention that a Beatles song went to #1, although saying it did so at the end of April '69 is maybe a little more useful.

Herman's Hermits seemed to have a consistently good run going into 1969, most of which I've avoided mentioning because it's all a bit forgettable and not particularly good. May #2 "My Sentimental Friend" is a notable exception. It's noteworthy that this feels rather backward-looking; one of the things I find most noticeable in music from 1969 is how much of it comes across as so painfully self-aware of being recorded at the end of a decade which had seen more musical evolution than any which had gone before - and quite possibly after, although the only person who'd know that in 1969 was Doctor Who.

Another record to feature this strange end-of-decade feeling is Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" (#6 June '69). It's such a brittle-sounding record, like it would shatter instantly if you reached out and grabbed it. I have a troubled relationship with it. There are bits I love, such as the doubled pedal steel and trumpet interlude, and bits where I wonder if it could have done with a shorter runtime and many fewer "lie-la-lie"s. Maybe I just have to be in the mood for something so relentlessly melancholy.

Sometimes it's the sheer sophistication which gets to me. There are times I enjoy it, times when I want the simpler and more obviously homemade charms of something like June #8 "Ragamuffin Man" by Manfred Mann. Yet another one with that end-of-decade feeling, even as it uses that most '60s of musical tropes, the descending scale of its chorus.

While it's the wistful backward-looking music which grabs my attention, 1969 was the year bubblegum pop started to come into its own. Tommy Roe's "Dizzy" (#1 June '69) codifies this sound, removing the last few oddities from prototype efforts such as the 1910 Fruitgum Company and the entirely manufactured but still all rather weird "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" by the Ohio Express. The higher register vocals and innocent lyrics were already there, it just needed the added slickness present here.

Surprisingly for how well-known "Green Onions" is now, it was never a hit on either side of the Atlantic back in 1962. The first single by the Stax house band goofing off to trouble the UK charts was the excellent "Soul Limbo" in January 1969. While there's a good chance any random person may be able to identify "Green Onions", if you ask with this the most likely answer you'll get in the UK is "the cricket theme", the BBC having used it at the start of Test Match Special for years. (The BBC's sports themes generally being both existing records and great picks.)

"Time Is Tight" is the one which really did something chart-wise though, going all the way to #4 in June '69. Between this and his work on the "Otis Blue" LP I've ended up with a lot of time for what Steve Cropper does on guitar. It's one thing to dazzle an audience with flash and complicated solos, it's quite another to make a great record out of something simple. "Time Is Tight" is all groove. You can see why the Clash found it worthy of covering.

Soul has a strong showing in these mid-'69 charts, although it surprises me just how many were reissues. Smokey Robinson & The Miracles hit #9 in June with "The Tracks Of My Tears", a recording that had been knocking around Motown since 1965. Even hearing it for the first time felt oddly familiar as I swear there's a Take That track which copies from it pretty much wholesale. Remind me if I ever get to writing about the early '90s.

I last mentioned Jackie Wilson back in the gimmick-laden early '60s, but "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher" shows the man who is easily confused with darts legend Jocky Wilson (at least, if you're assembling background images for Top of the Pops) having matured along with the pop world. Yet again, this is a hold-back; Brunswick records released it Stateside in 1967. I'm most familiar with it via a live version by the Move which turned up on a greatest hits compilation in the early 2000s.

Another one I picked up first on a compilation was Jethro Tull's #3 at the start of July, "Living In The Past". At this point they were still a heavy psychedelic folk band - possibly a little heavier than they had been on their debut album "This Was" in 1968. The 1969 follow-up "Stand Up" was notable for having a cut-out of the bad which would, through the magic of folded cardboard, stand up when the gatefold sleeve was opened. I used to have a copy, but it became an unfortunate casualty of people who claim they'll look after your records and then just swipe a load of the good ones.

It's time for a small, sad gesture of respect for the last Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich single before the band started shedding members and, by extension, parts of their own name. "Snake In The Grass" is perhaps an indication the band should have gone down with the Antoinette. It's not good, a kind of Village Green-era Kinks-lite, but with some important element missing I can't quite put my finger on. It struggled its way to #23 in June '69 as part of 7 weeks bumping around the very low ends of the Top 40.

At #2 in late June is yet another 1967 recording that suddenly seems to have found an audience two years later; "Oh Happy Day" by The Edwin Hawkins Singers. A big, welcoming gospel record with the slightest hint of "Walk On By" in that piano line. I don't know quite what it was about 1969 which made record companies so keen on putting out old recordings they'd had kicking around a while, or why so many had never been released over here in the first place. It's not like the charts of '67 were exactly wall to wall quality, unless you were Engelbert Humperdinck's bank manager.

1969 on the other hand is turning out to be a vintage year for the charts. At #8 in July we have one of those, "oh yes, of course, they'd be getting big around this time" moments with Creedence Clearwater Revival first entering the charts. They'd been going in the US a while: "Proud Mary" being from the band's second album under the CCR name, with them having played together for most of the '60s under some rather unfortunate band names.

Lead singer John Fogerty wrote the song immediately after returning from military service, although as a reservist, having managed to swing the paperwork to show him signing up for the reserves before the dreaded Vietnam draft letter arrived. Although the band were from California their style of swamp rock would forever be associated with the Lousiana bayou, helped along by lyrics of lazy riverboats. "Proud Mary" shows bayou rock arriving on the UK charts already fully formed, giving me a slight sense of nervousness since that fully-formed thing worked out so well for rock'n'roll and surf rock.

The little guitar fills and the solo were supposedly influenced by Steve Cropper's work. I can see it.

Displacing "Dizzy" from the #1 spot in mid-June was the Beatles with "The Ballad Of John And Yoko". There's a weird rushed feeling to the output of the "Get Back" sessions, and while this one was recorded a couple of months later it shares that. Overall I think the Beatles benefit from not overthinking things so much; when left raw the band's talent and sheer number of ideas shine through, and the early takes are more interesting than the ones they've processed and processed until it sounds like any other Beatles record, overwrought gimmicks and time-filling included. The "naked" version of "Let It Be" is one of their most consistently satisfying albums.

With that in mind, "The Ballad Of John And Yoko" is a bit too slight. As a chronicle of a year of bed-ins and the band falling apart it's a valid historical artifact, but really it's just a bluesy jam while John Lennon reels off a list of stuff which happened. I think I might just have an unhealthy amount of festering resentment at this point after one too many interesting ideas turned into another clap your hands and sing along triviality. Look, "Ballad" is fine. It doesn't do anything wild or innovative but it's perfectly listenable and feels like something which ought to have been released during 1969. Well, that and it was their first stereo-only 45 rpm release. And their last #1.

It feels almost appropriate that alongside the Beatles we have that other early-'60s stalwart, Elvis Presley. "In The Ghetto" (#2 July '69) is a fantastic record. I would make the case that post-comeback special, Vegas International Hotel residency-era Elvis is the best Elvis. Well, I would - but it's not just about being contrary. If you go through Elvis' early eras there are too many songs which might have been done better by others, too much time spent catching up to the Everly Brothers, too many torpid early '60s singles.

Vegas-era Elvis, there is a thing you expect from an Elvis record and my word does he deliver it. While it starts off low-key with a guitar line which puts me in mind of Simon & Garfunkel (particularly "Homeward Bound"), it just builds and builds, then suddenly takes it all away for the choruses so Elvis can start off again. It's a surprisingly affecting set of lyrics, and you barely notice because it's all wrapped up in that kind of sequins-and-pleather form of luxury, where it may not be particularly tasteful but by heck there's a lot of it.

It's not even his best single of 1969! (spoiler alert)

Having sassed surf rock for turning up fully-formed and then never going anywhere, I get a record which half makes my point and half undermines it. "Break Away" was a #6 for the Beach Boys in July '69, and so much of this could have been released at surf's peak in '63. But then so much of it couldn't have! There's a maturity and softness to it, and in places it owes more to bubblegum pop. But still, for a band who were ferociously experimental over that '66-'67 period it feels weird that, broken by the unreleased "Smile" and the very released "Wild Honey" (an album even less-liked as a Sgt. Pepper alternative than "Their Satanic Majesties"), the band went back to uncomplicated surf rock as if little had happened in the interim.

One of the first records to really make the case for '60s music in front of my youthful ears was unexpected July '69 #1, "Something In The Air" by Thunderclap Newman. And I mean unexpected. The band was assembled by Pete Townshend around drummer, singer and songwriter Speedy Keen, and named after their pianist. Townshend produced the record, and all were taken by surprise when it suddenly started selling in large numbers. A live version of the band was hastily assembled, but all of this faded as fast as it had begun, leaving Thunderclap Newman a one-hit wonder and curio. Back at the turn of the century I had to download this from Napster, because I couldn't even find a compilation with it on.

A minor presence in the UK charts, although absolutely huge in his native Ireland, was Joe Dolan. "Make Me An Island" was his biggest hit in the UK, slowly building to a #3 spot in August '69. It is fine pop in the vein of Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and the like, although I say that in the knowledge that I will call it fine for the purposes of this and then likely never listen to it again.

The Rolling Stones had a #1 going into August with "Honky Tonk Women". They still had a few more interesting ideas to give, and B-side "You Can't Always Get What You Want" is a classic, but for me this is the point where the Stones start to slide into generic "blooz" and a future of outrageous concert ticket prices aimed at people who've paid off the mortgage. It's plenty good enough, it's not like they'd lost their edge yet, but comes with that unwelcome feeling that this is about to be the music that people who haven't bought an album by a band formed since 1974 make you listen to while they're complaining that Pulp don't make music like you used to get.

Me, I'd rather stick with "Common People".

It also kept the Plastic Ono Band's "Give Peace a Chance" (#2 July '69) from that top spot. While Beatles had turned up in the background of all sorts of things, this is the first overt solo project to make the charts - John Lennon and Yoko Ono's vision for a "plastic band" which would constantly rotate members in and out. In one sense there's a sort of honesty that after all the Beatles' largely McCartney-led attempts to make clap-along records, Lennon comes out and makes a record which is overtly people clapping along. It's probably a bit harsh to judge it in this way, as it was recorded during one of the couple's bed-in protests to make a point, and indeed was used for much of the following decade as a rallying anti-war song. I guess if you're going to make a clap-along song, at least give people a worthy cause to do it to.

Unsurprisingly, nobody ever lets me just stay in bed all day even if I do claim it's a protest.

While we know them now as decade-spanning multiple platinum artists, in 1969 it looked like the Bee Gees would struggle to make it past the end of their first decade. Robin Gibb split from the band early in 1969, believing Barry Gibb was being given an unfair share of the limelight. By the end of the year, the band had fallen apart, with their brief commercial success fast fading.

Robin started a career as a solo artist, with "Saved By The Bell" hitting #2 in August '69. If you didn't have the name on the cover it would be hard to distinguish this from any other early Bee Gees record. Indeed, Maurice Gibb also worked on it. On the plus side, sounding like an early Bee Gees record and indeed having quite a significant proportion of Bee Gees on it means this is really rather good.

Although they never managed to match "Everlasting Love", the Love Affair were still having hits into 1969, with "Bringing On Back The Good Times" hitting #9 in August. It makes a good argument that we should have remembered the Love Affair better. That wistful sound of the year is creeping in again. It was even turning up on bands whose history was a lot noisier and brasher: "Curly" is an unusually soft August #12 from the Move. Mellotron spotters will be happy with this one.

The very end of the '60s had turned up a few one-hit wonders, some of them rather strange, and Zager & Evans fit into that category with "In The Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)", a #1 at the end of August '69. While relentlessly odd in a way which makes me think of the finer work of Dave Dee, Dozy and all of that lot, it was the cautionary science fiction message that found a willing audience. A lot had happened in the '60s. Man had walked on the moon for the first time only a few weeks before this record entered the charts. The question was starting to be asked what all this progress and automation was doing to our souls, with seminal TV series "The Prisoner" suggesting where we were going might not be a good place. Maybe it's that Zager & Evans hit a certain late '60s zeitgeist. Or maybe it's just that this was a pretty good record.

August saw the release of a record which had a long and rather tortuous story in the charts, including charting under two separate record companies. Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg's "Je t'aime... Moi Non Plus" was intended as an exceptionally pure form of love song, but ended up being a bit too much for 1969. It was banned from radio in the UK and many other countries for being too suggestive, with even Gainsbourg's native France only allowing the song to go out over the airwaves after 11pm.

It reached #2 in late September, only for Fontana to withdraw the single in the wake of adverse publicity. Gainsbourg managed to get another release on Major Minor Records, which entered the charts in October and within a week had gone to #1, the first single to do so while banned from the radio. In the interim Sounds Nice ft. Tim Mycroft saw a commercial opportunity and released "Love at First Sight (Je t'aime... Moi non plus)", an instrumental-only version sounding a little like a lost King Curtis track, which peaked at #18.

Which perhaps highlights one small problem with "Je t'aime". It's a great record ruined by a load of old sex noises. The introduction of it is brilliant, that funky guitar line followed by soft organ. Even the classic chanson pop vocals before it all devolves into (quite possibly genuine and induced in the studio, according to some accounts) orgasm work well, although it probably helps if you don't speak French well enough to notice that the lyrics are a little... direct. Sigh. I get what he was aiming at, but some things are maybe best left until after you've finished recording.

With "Je t'aime" banned and delisted for most of September, what did take the #1 spot? It's "Bad Moon Rising", Creedence Clearwater Revival at it again with the bayou rock. It's simple but effective, and was used to good effect in 1981 on the soundtrack to "An American Werewolf In London".

One might wonder if the Bee Gees really had their heart in splitting up, given both Robin Gibb's solo effort and what remained of the band's next single were pained breakup songs. "Don't Forget To Remember" owes a little to Nashville, a sort of slowed-down countrypolitan number which hit #2 in September. My word, it's good. I wonder if there's something about an impending or in-progress breakup which makes bands record great music, because it seems to happen an awful lot.

Another record with a strong countrypolitan influence was October #6, Karen Young's "Nobody's Child". Somewhat surprising, given other than the source material (a late 1940s country standard) this is all Made in Britain, Young having been born in Sheffield. It's well done, dramatic key changes and all.

Country seemingly had a brief fillip in these autumn charts, with Johnny Cash's live recording of Shel Silverstein's "A Boy Named Sue" going to #4 in October. It's a humourous talking blues, of the kind you'd occasionally find at the back end of a Townes Van Zandt or Arlo Guthrie album. And with some rather heavy-handed censorship, which I think I've heard removed on some modern reissues. At least, it's a safe bet Cash didn't sing "beep" at San Quentin.

Cash guested on a version of "Girl from the North Country" for Bob Dylan's "Nashville Skyline" album, from which "Lay Lady Lay" was a #5 hit in October. I've always had a soft spot for "Nashville Skyline", with its laid-back nature and Dylan's odd, crooning voice. This was rumoured by some to be a result of his 1966 motorcycle accident, but the chronology doesn't fit: "John Wesley Harding" was recorded in '67 and sounded little different to usual. A temporary break from smoking likely had more to do with it.

Another temporary breakup in the late '60s was the Shadows, Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch instigating only the most technical of breakups with the band back together by the early '70s. In the interim Hank Marvin put out single with Cliff Richard, "Throw Down A Line". It was originally written with Jimi Hendrix in mind, although that was something unlikely ever to happen, with even Jeff Beck discarding a version after recording it. Cliff Richard expressed an interest, with the result that this is a complete pop oddity. It is resolutely un-Cliff, to the point where unless you really knew his voice you wouldn't recognise it. I'm not sure it's particularly Hendrix either, although you can hear the influence. If anything it sounds like the really good elements of later Beatles, especially in that guitar line.

I think I may genuinely enjoy a Cliff Richard single. Even with "The Young Ones" there's something I don't quite like about the vocal, whereas this is solidly enjoyable across the board. This is it, folks, pop music has broken me. Why was it "Congratulations" and not this we got at parties, eh? (Don't answer that. I know why.)

Between CCR, the Bee Gees and Jethro Tull, the charts at this very tail end of the '60s are starting to feel like they're populated as much by the rise of people we think of as '70s artists as they are by '60s acts. In September another one of them enters the Top 40 for the first time - David Bowie, with "Space Oddity". It was released in July in the hope that the moon landing being fresh on everyone's mind would make it sell, but success was instead slow and organic with its peak of #5 only coming at the turn of November.

Bowie had actually been recording as Davy Jones since the early '60s with various bands including the Lower Third, including competent freakbeat number "You've Got a Habit of Leaving". As the decade rolled on he started recording as a solo artist, with no success in sight, despite such commercial opportunism as putting out an album of music-hall numbers under the guise of a variety performer persona in the novelty-receptive environment of 1967. "Space Oddity" is a musing on increasing feelings of isolation from a failing career, with imagery courtesy of going to see Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" after one too many joints.

For it (finally) launched his career, "Space Oddity" is still only a stopping point on Bowie's musical journey, excellent B-side "Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud" hinting at the musical direction on his self-titled 1969 album, "David Bowie". (As distinct from the 1967 album called "David Bowie"). It's folkish and pastoral, in line with what many baroque pop bands were doing in 1969, often with little commercial success.

Fleetwood Mac had a #2 in November with heavy jam "Oh Well", split across two sides of a single as a "Part 1" and "Part 2". It's strange that Part 1 is the A-side and these days gets more than 10 times the plays, as the dark and forbidding "Oh Well (Part 2)" is the thing actually intended to be the record, with Part 1 merely a throwaway. It's part acoustic guitar and cello, part harsh and discordant low electric guitar notes, all slow and menacing, a sort of lawful evil "Classical Gas". How anything this avant-garde sold this many copies is a fine reflection on the musical judgement which makes 1969's charts such a pleasure.

At #3 is The Hollies' "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother". In another advance notification of the '70s, that's Elton John on piano, paying his dues as a session musician. This is one of those great singles, taking an awful lot from blue-eyed soul in the style of the Walker Brothers and marrying it to the slow and determined late baroque pop sound. I fear it may be impossible to extricate it from its later and somewhat overplayed history, but it's worth trying.

One of the things which surprised me compiling the shortlist for all of this is how much reggae was in the charts around the turn of the '70s, before inexplicably disappearing. Late 1969 has a strong showing, with the Upsetters' instrumental "Return of Django" at #5 in November and the Pioneers' "Long Shot Kick De Bucket" down at #21. Of all things it's about a race horse. Called Long Shot. He died. It's all there in the title, really.

Even this minor success abroad was enough for the Pioneers to decide to relocate to the UK, which they did in 1970.

Part of the reason for the sales of reggae records at this point is that they weren't selling only to people of Jamaican heritage or with connections to the reggae scene. There was a growing skinhead movement in the late '60s: younger people who felt disaffected, left behind by hippie and particularly mod fashions gravitating to expensive clothes, and protested by giving themselves simple all-over buzz cuts (grade 2 or 3) and wearing simple, work-oriented clothes. They felt a kinship with bands from run-down Jamaican townships, and the similar poor treatment the Windrush generation received from society.

While the early skins may have found friends with the Caribbean diaspora, some were extremely unfriendly to South Asian immigrants, even from early on in the movement. This schism over whether violence and racism were a part of working class values or not (and I would suggest strongly they are not) repeated multiple times over various waves of skinhead cultures, leading to the rather pejorative use of the word today despite the many skinhead groups campaigning for decency and, well, not being a dick to people who are in broadly the same situation as you and just want to get on with their lives.

Another record this group bought in volume was Harry J's "Liquidator", recorded with his studio band The All Stars and going to #9 at the end of November . It's one of the classic reggae instrumentals, driven along by a variety of organ lines while the rhythm section just sit underneath there doing their thing. It also suffered from a somewhat slapdash approach to mastering, with many records being returned to shops for unwelcome hisses or scratchy sounds. They all do that, sir.

I could talk about 1969's crop of reggae records for far too long, but I've already written a lot about this year and it's not remotely over yet. Frank Sinatra released "Love's Been Good To Me", from his tribute album to Rod McKuen (on which McKuen wrote all the songs), "A Man Alone". I quite like this one, it's more in style of later Matt Monro or one of those post-Template easy listening artists. It went to #8 in November.

I haven't mentioned bubblegum pop for a while, but in October we get the genre's defining moment. From the start the Monkees had wanted to play their own instruments or at least give credit to the people who did in their stead, but by 1967 the band were increasingly adamant about writing their own material. So when Don Kirshner offered them a potential new bubblegum hit they turned it down in no uncertain terms, starting a rebellion which led to Kirshner's sacking. (There is some debate whether it is the song I'm about to mention or a similarly titled one; the Monkees and Kirshner say it was, the song's own writers suggest not).

Kirshner moved employment to CBS, where he was put in charge of music for a cartoon adaptation of the long-running Archie comic. This would feature a song every week, performed on screen by the cartoon's main characters but of course put together by session musicians behind the scenes. Pieces were starting to fall together here. Bubblegum pop was a place of one-hit wonders; buyers seemed to have loyalty more to songs than they did acts. Indeed, Ohio Express proved you didn't need a real band beyond the session musicians, so long as you had a name to put on the cover. Bubblegum pop also had a young audience, one likely to be watching Saturday morning cartoons and to have a positive response to the characters.

The Archies could be the band. Any session musicians who got fed up with creative direction could be replaced, Kirshner having invented the Plastic Ono Band one year early. The cartoon characters would never talk back unless you asked the animators specifically to make them do so.

This really was a lot of high talk for something that was only a TV tie-in novelty. The first two singles "Bang Shang-A-Lang" and "Feelin' So Good (S.K.O.O.B.Y.-D.O.O.)" were US-only releases and at best minor hits in 1968. And, in case you noticed that title, they predate "Scooby Doo, Where Are You?" which first aired in 1969, although the success of the Archies did lead to its development.

When Jeff Barry and Andy Kim presented their next candidate for an Archies single, Kirshner realised this had a chance of being something special. He instructed radio stations to play it without mentioning the band, hoping for listeners to hear it and want to buy it before finding out it was the Archies and writing it off as promotional nonsense for kids.

This, of course, was "Sugar, Sugar". Bubblegum pop's perfect moment, with a ready-made music video featuring kisses turning people into frogs and rabbits, interspersed with that oh-so-groovy Filmation dancing. I think I see Kirshner's point about telling radio stations not to name the band. If you didn't know this was cartoon rock, if you thought this was the work of some hard-grafting group from a nondescript California town, you'd be a lot less inclined to put it down. The melody line using marimba doubled with something else (electric piano, maybe?), the acoustic guitar occasionally drifting out to emphasise certain lines, the perfect "ba-ba-ba" backing vocals... all combine to make one of those fantastic pop records.

It even ended up on the back of cereal boxes in the US, perhaps safe in the knowledge it'd be cut out, worn out, and then a more durable real copy purchased in its stead. Over here, it was a massive #1 at the end of October '69, with 23 weeks in the Top 40, most in the upper reaches of the chart. One of the biggest records of the decade. Even if it didn't hit the heights of "She Loves You" or "My Way" sales-wise, that's still some good going for five cartoon characters and a dog.

I must move on, and in doing so I should mention "Everybody's Talkin'", a Harry Nilsson cover of a Fred Neil song which went to #23 after being featured in the film "Midnight Cowboy". I'm not a fan of Nilsson, finding that much of his work is a few nice ideas which grate by about the second or third minute, but this one is nice, with an easygoing laid-back feel. Alright, maybe I might get bored of that "wooowoow" vocal thing pretty quickly.

One surprise with the Beatles' mid-'60s sound is that for all I may complain about it, it produced a lot of #1 hits and yet... nobody ever really seemed to copy it, other than the occasional near 1:1 cover. The Tremeloes' "(Call Me) Number One" might be an exception. A mixture of clippings from Sgt. Pepper and the White Album, with harmonies, echoey vocals, and the bouncing rhythm and bassline that were previously the sole domain of Paul McCartney. While it's not exactly innovating, in terms of pleasurable listening this is the student exceeding the master. Maybe this is the result of taking the best of a dozen or more Beatles records, making it unfair for me to compare it to just one, but I don't care. I like it more. Ironically given the title, it missed out on that top spot, reaching #2 in November.

Alright, one more reggae track. Jimmy Cliff's "Wonderful World, Beautiful People" went to #6 in November. This is more akin to the later records which studios would target at the UK market, with ever-present strings and a sunny, uplifting nature.

Kenny Rogers and the First Edition's "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town" takes the band in a very country direction with a song first recorded by Waylon Jennings, and was a December #2 with 19 weeks in the Top 40. With lyrics about being a disabled veteran and "that crazy Asian war" you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a Vietnam protest song; I certainly thought so. Writer Mel Tillis claims the war in question is the 1939-1945 one, and besides that the protagonist is not entirely sympathetic if you listen all the way through.

We're reaching the end of the year, and thus the end of the decade, and starting to feel like there are too many things left to fit in those scant few weeks. At least, that's my excuse for why Beatles double A-side "Something"/"Come Together" only hit #4 in November. The first of those is an argument that George Harrison really should have been allowed to contribute a lot more, because this is a masterpiece. It's astonishing that he was reduced to offering it to Joe Cocker.

In reality, it's that old spectre of album sales keeping this one down. Both sides are on the "Abbey Road" LP, which had already been out a couple of weeks. "Come Together" is the opening track, and while it's one of those Lennon mishmashes of words it's a good one, heavy, pounding and with an air of mystery befitting its strange lyrics.

"Abbey Road" was the last album the boys recorded, "Get Back" being mired in production hell with Phil Spector adding orchestral bells and whistles the band didn't want for its eventual release in 1970 as "Let It Be". After all my complaining about the Beatles, all my moans of tweeness and clap-alongness and unwelcome whiffs of the music hall... I love this one. It has its missteps, mostly in the middle of the first side, but it is the one post rock'n'roll Beatles album which consistently stands on its own without needing someone to stand over your shoulder to explain how this was an experiment or that was the first time someone used that sound effect or something about four track tape recorders.

What gets me with "Abbey Road", especially on the B side song suite that kicks off in full with "You Never Give Me Your Money" is the sense of ending. It's the ideal 1969 record. The end of a decade, the end of the Beatles, the end of a whole pile of social mores and values both good and bad. This was one of the first Beatles albums I ever listened to in entirety, on a beaten-up copy badly in need of cleaning which used to skip on "Come Together" until I got round to sticking it in an ultrasonic machine a couple of years ago. Remember, this was back in those times when you only heard the odd track on the radio, and what an introduction to the rest. It only furthered the mystique that there was this undiscovered body of album tracks which would blow your mind.

Perhaps that's why I ended up finding the rest a little disappointing. I began with the best stuff.

The sense of ending is also present on Stevie Wonder's "Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday", a December '69 #2. What happened to the world we knew, indeed? Oddly for something which fits the spirit of late 1969 so well, this is yet another Motown reheat, having been recorded in 1967. At least there's a good reason; Stevie Wonder was having some vocal problems and wasn't able to record anything new.

Blue Mink's "Melting Pot" is the first record here to reach its peak in 1970, hitting #3 in January. It's a nice sentiment, but there's something quite spectacularly oblivious about writing a song pleading for racial harmony and then using a racial slur right there in the lyrics. Between that and the assimilationist themes, it might suggest that the first thing we need is to ask some people who aren't exactly the same as us what they'd like out of things.

There is one last statement on the 1960s from Engelbert Humperdinck, with "Winter World Of Love" hitting #7 in December '69, the month it namechecks as a shameless Christmas record. I think I prefer Tom Jones' "Without Love (There Is Nothing)" (#10 December '69), spoken word introduction and all. It's just that bit more sophisticated, and yet hits higher highs when it does finally let loose.

There's one last loose end for me to tie up with 1969, and it's my teasing of a better Elvis single. "Suspicious Minds" is the popular pick for the definitive Vegas-era Elvis single. It entered the Top 40 at the end of November, hitting #2 in January '70. It's all excess: neon, chrome and gospel backing singers. Elvis borders on self-parody, it lurches between slow and fast sections with utter gracelessness, it gets lost in its own "caught in a trap" refrain only to be rescued by the most ham-fisted fade out and in, and all of these things make it great. It's the acceptance that an Elvis record shouldn't be perfect, it should have great big panel gaps and all sorts of unnecessary chintz everywhere, while still representing an awful lot of luxury for the money.

There's a live version somewhere which has that late-'60s Elvis habit of upping the tempo of everything about 20% and that is even better. I have no idea where to find it, but there's a massive crowd cheer as the song starts and Elvis going "shove it up your nose" for Reasons. It was broadcast on Top Of The Pops once in about '96. Good luck with that one.

Right at the end of 1969 Delaney & Bonnie manage to create the awkward trivia question of "who was the other band Eric Clapton played with in the '60s", with "Comin' Home" entering the charts right around the end of December and going to #16 the following year. It's a serviceable enough slice of bluesy jam rock. A bit like the Bluesbreakers, this was one of those bands which in its "And Friends" incarnation produced more in the way of memorable alumni than it did memorable records.

There is one unfortunate blot 1969 makes on its copybook, with the final #1 of the decade being Rolf Harris' "Two Little Boys" at the end of December. Really, people. Two weeks. We know the 1970s had a thing for buying horrible records and tacky novelties, it's the thing the decade is famous for. It would have been narratively perfect for me to have opened with this as the first record of 1970. You, here and now in 1969, are better than this.

Also it's rather unfortunate subject matter given the artist's conviction and imprisonment in 2014.

I am not going to end the decade with this. I'm going to end it with one of its last chart entries and eventual #3, Marmalade's "Reflections Of My Life". Because this is a band about to make amends for that "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" cover. Like "(Call Me) Number One", it seems the Beatles broke up just at the point bands began to be able to effectively emulate them. Graham Knight's bass sounds like McCartney. Junior Campbell picks up that lovely George Harrison tone with the guitar. Alan Whitehead on drums does a decent impression of Ringo in places with that instantly recognisable "just hit a bunch of them without worrying too much whether it's the right ones at the right time" approach.

But it's sad, wistful and backward-looking, those most 1969 attributes. We're looking back at music's most incredible decade, one which still casts a shadow over our listening today, one whose music will still turn up in the background without us even thinking about it. You'd raise an eyebrow if you went to the pub and they were playing "Here In My Heart". You wouldn't even notice if they were playing "Reflections Of My Life".

(Admittedly, you might notice if they were playing "Legend Of Xanadu").

What surprises me with 1969 is how much it is the chart of the decade. Far more so than the standard rockist pick of '67, more so than the musically better than '67 but still inconsistent '66 and '68. Nearly everything I've mentioned in this year has been recognisable, part of the accepted "greatest hits" of the 1960s from which the tracklists of nostalgic compilations are assembled. And so many of them have been not just recognisable, but good. While some of this may be selective reading of my shortlist, it's been easier to pick great records than any other year, and I've mostly done so by accident. The biggest difficulty has been that there was so much to write about; so many things happening, so many disparate movements with interesting stories all coming together in one vintage year.

It makes it hard to pick up the headphones and the spreadsheet again, knowing my next musical excursion will be into that dreaded decade of pop: the 1970s.

1970

The 1970s is a decade with a reputation. The decade that taste forgot. I grew up with everything from the Simpsons to Leisure Suit Larry seeing it as an easy target to mine for comedy, from the naff fashion and preponderance of man-made fibres to the disco music, which nothing could be deader than. It was a decade of inconsequentiality, of shang-a-langing teenyboppers and two chord rock glammed up with so many reflective surfaces the BBC cameras would go a bit funny filming it.

And yet, for all it mocked the decade, the '90s existed in a long shadow of '70s musical heritage. Parental record collections bulged with landmark albums, your "Hotel California"s and "Wish You Were Here"s, with CD reissues of the same crowding record shops. Go to a pub or restaurant and you'd as likely hear something from the '70s in the background as you would something modern - I remember being both bemused and pleased to find on a family holiday to the Isle of Wight that nearly every business I walked into seemed to be playing Queen. Commercial radio would stick on the Jam or Fleetwood Mac even if it wasn't an oldies station.

As a result, I go into the 1970s with anticipation. I know there will be Rollermania and Wombles and records called "Grandad". But I also know there will be other things, Bowie and T. Rex in their imperial days, the rise of punk and new wave, and other wonders I am yet to discover. Besides which, 1969 was an excellent year and it's not like the charts are going to fall apart instantly just because it's a new decade, even if we do go into 1970 with the foreboding portent that is Rolf Harris at #1.

The first song on my list is Badfinger's "Come And Get It", entering the charts in the second week on January and going to #4 by the end of the month. I ended the 1960s with a record which perfectly emulated the Beatles, and I start the 1970s with one. Technically a December '69 release, but I care about when these things entered the Top 40 as it's the tastes of a nation I'm interested in.

It is also not really emulating the Beatles, since Badfinger were protégés of Paul McCartney and McCartney not only wrote the song, but recorded his own version prior to this one and even plays on the Badfinger one, banging a tambourine in addition to producing the record. The band's name (after a brief stint as The Iveys) even comes from a rejected Beatles song title.

Badfinger's story is one of early promise turning to tragedy, with the band struggling after Apple Records' near-collapse and reduction to merely a Beatles catalogue administrator in 1974. Saddled with mortgage debt and an uncertain future for the band, Pete Ham committed suicide in 1975. Bizarre coincidence: I used to work in the pub he drank at the night of his death. Not at the time, of course. They never mentioned it.

But in 1970 that was half a decade ahead, and we have a record which shows a lot of promise. Like so many of the late '60s Beatle-alikes, the somewhat rougher-edged performance works to the record's benefit. Gives it a bit more soul and all of that. This might not be a million miles from "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" in terms of core musical themes, but it's a world apart when it comes to listenability.

One of the decade's big acts enters the charts in the same week as Badfinger; Chicago with a cover of the Spencer Davis Group's "I'm A Man" that hit #8 in February. On the album it's an extended 7-minute jam, but the 1970 single condenses this to three and a half minutes. If you've heard the original you know what to expect from this. Just add some very '70s bow-chicka rhythm guitar and a few squealing solos. (Yes, it was recorded in early '69, but it's still a very '70s sound.)

Beating out both of these '69 recordings for both age and chart position is Peter, Paul And Mary's "Leavin' On A Jet Plane", a 1967 album track which saw a single release in late '69 and climbed to #2 in February '70. It is very clearly a 1967 record, with shades of what Simon & Garfunkel were doing around that time. While this is the famous one, John Denver recorded the original. Three times, in fact, and he was quite closely associated with this one too. (They shared a producer, Milt Okun).

The first #1 of 1970 was Edison Lighthouse's "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" in the last week of January. It's an intriguing mix of 1960s bubblegum pop tropes and some very '70s sounds; if you listen to the rhythm guitar carefully you can make out something rather akin to T-Rex. While I hold with my view that charts don't change overnight, it's interesting to hear how many of these records just sound 1970s. That said, I did say the same thing about a fair few records from 1969 so really we're just seeing natural evolution here.

Besides, there are plenty of '60s-sounding records still around. Shocking Blue's "Venus" (#8 February 1970) doesn't do anything to hide that it was released in the Netherlands in mid-'69. Even with a break at 2:40 which sounds an awful lot like it came from "Pinball Wizard"! The riff and chorus would become their own clichés, with even early games offering cheesy MIDI renditions of this, the "she's got it" song.

The habit of 1969's charts to be packed with ultra-recognisable songs certainly continues into 1970 with February #2 "Let's Work Together" from Canned Heat. If you didn't spot it from the title, this is the "c'mon, c'mon, let's work together" song, maybe better known as "Let's Stick Together" with slightly different lyrics as recorded by Brian Ferry. In this form it had been around since 1962, originally by Wilbert Harrison, with the more universal lyrics about working together an improved version he came up with in 1969. As a message, it succeeds rather more than "Melting Pot".

I give a brief mention to Boris Gardiner & The Love People's "Elizabethan Reggae", a 1968 reggae version of a 1962 piece of light classical music that got reissued in '69 with this new title, having originally been "Elizabeth Reggae". It went to #14 in March '70, and is a great record, all bounce and bubbling organs.

Whether by accident or design, Herman's Hermits presaged the foppish sound which would drive a lot of '70s musical triviality on "Years May Come And Years May Go", a #7 in March. It has a beat which I can only describe, with one nervous eye on the future, as "wombling".

Entering the chart in the same early February week as the Hermits is one of those songs that ended up a byword for the '70s, "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5 (#2 March '70). Motown considered a few artists for this one, and the backing structure could indeed be any Motown act, but the vocals are very distinctively 11-year-old Michael. (Possibly even 10; recording started before his birthday in August). He is good at what he does, but also very noticeably about 11 years old. I respect the achievement, but for me it's a little too much high-pitched excitability. Which is one of the elements most mocked before "I Want You Back" started regaining critical respectability into the early 2000s.

In one sense I think it's unfair to make this single emblematic of the cheesy, massive-collared 1970s, not least because it's really a 1969 record. It's an obvious progression on from the bubblegum pop of that year, filtered through capable and high-gloss Motown production. But in another sense it is, with a child star at the front of a band with matching outfits. This is the gimmickry the decade would become notorious for, and while here it's paired with a decent pop song it wasn't long before opportunists realised you didn't need the tunes or the talent, you only needed the gimmick.

Lee Marvin's "Wand'rin' Star" (#1 March '70) certainly has an unwelcome whiff of novelty to it, coming from the film adaptation of 1951 stage musical "Paint Your Wagon". It's the slightly flat singing riddled with vocal fry which tips this over into "why are you buying this?" territory for me. I can't sing either, but at least I don't demand not to have someone better do the job instead. Sacha Distel's cover of "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" was another musical number making the charts, at #10 in March '70 doing better than the B.J. Thomas original from the "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" film.

Another sin of "Wand'rin Star" is that it kept final original-run Beatles single "Let It Be" from the top spot. It feels unfair that of all the unbearably twee Beatles records to hit #1, this genuinely satisfying one never went higher than #2. Overwrought and overproduced Phil Spector's contributions may be, but the fundamental honesty and immediacy of the "Get Back" sessions shines through. The "naked" version, stripped of all the ornamentation, sounds like the greatest track Badfinger never recorded. Between this and Abbey Road, there's a part of me that wonders what might have been had the Beatles managed to keep it together into the '70s. They only just start making thoroughly great records again, and then they split up. Typical.

Chart position aside (and #2 is still a pretty decent placing), "Let It Be" is an apt closing statement on the band. Their breakup was complex and acrimonious, not being on official paperwork until the end of 1974 thanks in part to the extensive tax liabilities of their joint businesses, but most would put the ending point at Paul McCartney's public announcement he was quitting the band on 10th April 1970. In reality, while McCartney had reconvened with Harrison and Starr to finish off "Get Back", now re-titled as "Let It Be", the band had ceased to exist as a functioning unit with John Lennon having privately walked out on 20th September 1969.

While McCartney had conceived of "Get Back" as a back-to-basics project which would reunite the band, it was the constant losing of arguments with Phil Spector over the incessant studio fiddling and unwantedly lavish arrangements of that project which contributed to him finally calling time on the Beatles. Indeed, the project had failed at that goal right from the start. Harrison, increasingly frustrated by McCartney's stranglehold on songwriting and Lennon's seeming disinterest in anything Beatles-related by that point, had already walked out in January '69, although only temporarily.

Whatever the date, in the refined and condensed narrative of pop history this, more than anything, marked the point at which the '60s were over. Y'know. Not like you'd use a calendar or anything.

One of the arguments driving a wedge into the band was the schedule of solo releases, particularly albums. With all four members increasingly involved in solo projects and collaborations from 1968, these had to be released so as not to compete with each other for potential customers' limited disposable income, and that above all the band would come first.

With fractious intra-band relationships (and perhaps a perception that Phil Spector was ruining the creative intent of the new album anyway, the big ruiner), this became a contentious notion. McCartney had made a series of low-tech home recordings as solace from the deteriorating situation of the Beatles, and wished for it to be released as an album in April. This brought it directly into conflict with the May release of "Let It be", which it would upstage and perhaps discourage consumers from buying if those simple four-track songs weren't well received. It was another factor in McCartney quitting the band in April, and releasing "McCartney" anyway.

Having exited the Beatles back in '69, John Lennon no longer needed to worry about any upset caused by record scheduling, providing Apple released the records, so "Let It Be" competed for sales with the Plastic Ono Band and "Instant Karma!", giving us the opportunity to compare the two.

But first, I have to admit to a problem I have with John Lennon's solo career. It is merely OK. I came to it as a teenager with a head full of Abbey Road, the best tracks of the Yellow Submarine film and George Harrison's work with the Traveling Wilburys. I was told by the adults around me that the Beatles solo had surpassed their ensemble efforts, releasing music of greater complexity and intrigue than anything they'd done together.

This was against a background of the '90s moving on from the 25th anniversary of Sergeant Pepper and the "Free As A Bird" project and Oasis' subsequent aping of the band by starting to focus on those solo careers. Regarding John Lennon, I'd had a cassette copy of "Imagine" and enjoyed some of the songs (if not others), and some passing familiarity with 1982's greatest hits "John Lennon Collection", but in 1997 I found myself in a record shop holding the then-new "Lennon Legend" compilation. John glowered back at me from the cover, a black and white photo seemingly chosen to look as much like Noel Gallagher as possible.

This was from that period in the '90s of bloated tracklists and using the full 80 minutes the CD audio red book allowed, and if anything suggested that the more tracks you added to a Lennon's Greatest Hits, the worse a case it made for his post-Beatles career being a decade overflowing with great ideas and essential tracks. I ended up forcing myself to like these songs because if I had good musical taste I was supposed to like them. They were just about good enough for that self-delusion to work, at least at a time where my record collection numbered 20-30 albums total. But as time wore on and that number increased, I found myself able to listen to fewer and fewer tracks of the album and think, "this is the best music I've ever heard". Eventually I began to skip the less good ones, then all but a couple of tracks, until "Lennon Legend" was consigned to a dusty corner along with that really bad Oasis album from 2000 and never played again.

Anyway, after all of that I can tell you that "Instant Karma!" (#5 February '70) was one of the few tracks to survive this process to the very end. There must be some positive effect of haste upon Beatles and ex-Beatles, because this was written, recorded and released quickly. It's a typical Lennon word salad, matched to repurposed bits of "All You Need Is Love" (the progression underneath the verses). All of this was arranged in the style of an early wall of sound recording by none other than Phil Spector himself, something which works rather better than all the unnecessary flourishes he was adding to "Let It Be".

Also inspired by Phil Spector was enormous March #1, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" from Simon & Garfunkel. Art Garfunkel sounds tiny (or maybe just far away) over a huge and yet somehow empty-feeling backing. It almost ends and then returns for a second innings with the "sail on, silvergirl" duet and repeat of the chorus, a last-minute addition Paul Simon was not entirely keen on being made to write. It was one of 1970's first real consistent sellers, spending 17 weeks in a Top 40 where most records were at most only just breaking into double digits.

Unfortunately those creative differences took their toll, and the band joined the ranks of 1960s heavyweights breaking up at the turn of the decade, Paul Simon "just wanting out", in his own words.

A record I never realised was a cover is Bob and Marcia's "Young, Gifted And Black" (#5 April '70). It was originally sung by Nina Simone, with lyrics by Weldon Irvine. Production was by Harry J, of "Liquidator" renown. It's got that lovely bubbly reggae sound, and great string work. Why does the popularity of reggae never come up when people talk about this era of pop? These are highlights for me every time one of them comes up, songs that are fun with a lot of pop sensibility but also with the depth of craft that keeps them satisfying on the 2nd, 3rd or indeed even 100th listen.

As 1970 got going the long-lasting hits started rolling in, with Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit In The Sky" hitting #1 going into May from a March Top 40 entry and spending 17 weeks in that chart, although at a lower average position than "Bridge Over Troubled Water". It's another one of those '60s holdovers with an oddly current sound, having been recorded in '68 and released in December '69. I marvel at this. Can you imagine this coming out alongside "Lily The Pink" and "I'm A Tiger", which would have been entirely possible? It would have sounded like it was from some distant and unimaginable future. Well, a thoroughly imaginable future about a year and a half away, I guess.

We've had a bad run of Eurovision-winning singles in these pages, but I find little to object to with Dana's "All Kinds Of Everything", which won the contest for Ireland in 1970 and went to #1 in April. A sort of baroque pop "My Favourite Things", it has made me divert my attention into wondering which songs to win the competition have been genuinely good. But then if I discussed that here, I'd be spoiling the rest of the '70s. And after a few listens I'm not sure if "genuinely good" might be a little bit of an optimistic assessment here, although it's certainly not objectionable.

If there is a '70s-by-way-of-the-'60s sound espoused by Norman Greenbaum et al., then Frijid Pink offer a near-parody of it on May #4 "House Of The Rising Sun", recorded authentically in 1969 and released in December of that year. I love the relentless over-the-top heaviness, probably the heaviest single I've reviewed so far in this overview of the charts. (Please don't check my homework, this really is a nonsense stream of consciousness I spew forth as I listen to each record and I'm fairly sure I've contradicted myself several times already.)

May #5 "Daughter Of Darkness" from Tom Jones is gloriously overwrought. I love this idea that Tom Jones records can become progressively more Tom Jones, and as they do they become better and better. Nobody else could pull this off. Well, maybe Vegas-era Elvis. Apparently Elton John sang on it somewhere. I'm struggling to spot it amongst all of the... well, all.

Now, somewhere back in the introduction to this I mentioned the debilitating effect on a class of 11-year-olds of "Come On You Reds", and I bring this up because displacing "Spirit In The Sky" from #1 in May '70 is the 1970 England World Cup Squad with "Back Home". I would be lying if I claimed I thought this is a good record, but it is a record. At least, I presume so. I can't think of any other way they'd have got it to top the charts in 1970, unless this was inexplicably popular on Tefifon. If the Beatles had done it in 1967, people would probably have called the football stadium sound effects and marching band beat daring and innovative. Here, it is not.

Somehow the Moody Blues managed to take "Question" to #2 in May '70, a number from "A Question Of Balance" which puts me in mind of Tom Jones without the Tom Jones. It does slow down and get a bit more prototypically Moodies after the first couple of minutes, although that's an awful number of false stops and it never quite loses the feeling this could have been an amazing Tom Jones record. On the 'B' side is "Candle of Life", one of my favourite tracks of all time. I'd have liked this single, but I suspect it's the flip side I'd have worn out first.

A very '60s-sounding #1 from June '70 is Christie's "Yellow River", rejected by the Tremeloes as being a bit too bubblegum. It's maybe a little slight, in that I can feel it disappearing from my memory even as I listen to it. There are some nice guitar bits at the end maybe, which feel like they owe a little to CCR-style bayou rock.

A strange bubblegum pop offshoot is June '70 #2 "Groovin' With Mr. Bloe", a record apparently launched by the BBC playing the wrong side of a Wind single. It was absolute filler of the kind Buddah Records loved to put on their B-sides, but must have hit a '70s nerve as UK record label Dick James Music were desperate to release it as a single in its own right. Failures in rights negotiation led to a re-recording, first a rejected version with Elton John on piano and then a version with Zack Laurence replacing him.

And yet I have to juxtapose such triviality with a very non-trivial record, Marvin Gaye's June #9 "Abraham, Martin and John". Originally written by Dick Holler and recorded first by Dion, it's Marvin Gaye's version that is the definitive one, a beautifully subtle number you won't even notice is a protest song unless you listen to it carefully. It's another one of those '69 recordings, but what's a year or so either way when this is so perfect, all soaring strings and soft vocals?

Incidentally, this is from the songwriter responsible for "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron". I guess redemption arcs are a thing.

Meanwhile it is 1970, and Status Quo have given up their psychedelic stylings. "Down The Dustpipe" (#12 July '70) is the first Status Quo single to feel recognisably Quo, with the simple shuffle blues and no more than two chord shapes in play. Of course at the time it was unrecognisable as Quo, leading to unpopular reception in some places.

Jackson 5 follow-up "ABC" peaked at #8 in July '70, and it's more of the same - bubblegum lyrics, slick soul, call-and-response between Michael and the rest of the Jacksons. Which means I have the same problem. It's all a bit wearing, isn't it? All that high-pitched youthful energy.

Four Tops number "It's All In The Game" (#5 July '70) offers a bit of a chance to relax. We've seen other versions of this crop up a couple of times in these pages, and it's nice to see what Motown did with it. It's still slow and gentle, but also has that undeniable Motown feel to it and infectious "do-do-do-doo"s sprinkled liberally throughout the coda.

Given the last version I mentioned was Cliff Richard's, maybe I should check in on how he's doing and... oh no, that was a horrible idea. "Goodbye Sam, Hello Samantha" (#6 July '70) somehow combines the worst of 1970 and the worst of Cliff into one horrible record, a cloying saccharine mess with those frustratingly thin, convictionless Home Counties vocals.

I fear the wall-to-wall quality of 1969 is beginning to fade and my journey is about to start getting rather more wearing. Massive July '70 #1 "In The Summertime" by Mungo Jerry reportedly took just 10 minutes to write, and feels it. It's so lazy the three and a half minute single was created by playing an original two minute recording twice, the second time slightly edited and cut down.

I know it's supposed to be simple, feelgood and summery, but then Nicky Thomas' reggae cover of "Love of the Common People" (#9 July '70) manages to do exactly the same without being so unbearably naff. This was the first version of the song to break into the UK Top 40, although the Everly Brothers had recorded a lovely baroque pop version in 1967 that did about as well as the rest of their later career. (i.e. not very).

Besides, while there may be ill winds blowing in these summer '70 charts, there is still a lot of quality to enjoy.

Peaking at #3 in July '70 was Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Up Around The Bend", one of the band's finest swamp-rocking moments. This manages a great sense of both time and place, in that it is both very 1970s and very American. You can just imagine this blasting forth from some enormous square-rigged station wagon with implausible plastic wood along the sides, as it drives down one of those endlessly long two-lane roads through autumnal trees. Not so much a second-hand Mini in Basingstoke.

Another record which sounds all rather '70s and American is Free's "All Right Now" (#2 July '70), which is unexpected because the band are very British, having been formed in London in 1968. Well. Lead singer Paul Rodgers is part Canadian. I think it's a combination of wearing those hard-rocking influences on their sleeve, and several decades of it being used to soundtrack any British event where people with Chevrolets, cowboy boots and Stetsons gather in a field of a Saturday. American by association.

Far more unmistakeably English is "Lola", taking the Kinks to #2 in August. This is a difficult one to write about. As a rock song, it's a great track from a great album. But a song about meeting either a cross-dresser or a pre-op transsexual in a club from 1970 is going to have some issues, even if its outlook on the encounter is positive. (Accounts vary on which, although the balance tends to be toward the titular Lola being a male identifying cross-dresser). It does feature some of the tropes which were acceptable in lazy comedy writing until, shockingly, the early 2010s - recent enough that we're still living through the backlash from some particularly entitled writers being asked, "hey, could you try actually being funny instead?"

On the other hand, Lola tries to tell a positive story. The problem is that in 1970, even the Kinks, friendly as they were to their LGBT+ following, had to do so using the language of their time. Ray Davies even went on record to explain that it's supposed to be a happy ending, the intention is that you like Lola. I spent some time checking this out, and it seems that in the community opinions are split between people who love the representation, the surprisingly progressive treatment for 1970 and indeed it being a great record, and people who dislike the stereotypes and (a particularly common complaint) being compared to the song or even having it sung at them as mockery.

And yet despite this, the main thing the BBC objected to was the use of "Coca-Cola", resulting in a hasty overdub to "cherry cola" for radio airplay. Whichever version you grew up with, the other always sounds a little jarring when you hear it.

Hitting #11 in August '70 was Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi", one of those records which I was aware must have been released at some point, but never quite exactly when. The bouncy acoustic folk belies a conservationist, anti-commercial message. While some late '60s records were already hinting at  some unease with the modernity of the times, the '70s saw a determined push against the foppish, city-focused culture which peaked in '67. This would turn up in the music with Led Zeppelin retreating to Bron-Yr-Aur in Wales and peppering their third and fourth albums with soft acoustic tracks, but it was against a background of a society looking back toward rural life, sustainability, and simpler times.

Perhaps some of this helped drive "Neanderthal Man" to #2 in August '70. The band was called Hotlegs, although they would soon decide it would be a lot snappier and less embarrassing to call themselves 10cc. The record itself was mere studio messing around - the band were testing a drum recording technique until Dick Leahy of Philips Records asked to hear what they were doing and decided it could be a hit. That explains the drum-forward sound, and general feel that this is a bit like how the Troggs would have sounded if nobody had known where to put the microphone.

Above it at #1 in August '70 we have perhaps the most Vegas-era Elvis record going, even more so than "Suspicious Minds": "The Wonder Of You". It's from a live performance at the International Hotel, and while I don't know how many overdubs and cleanups went into making this a single it must have been quite something to have seen on the stage. I loved this record from the moment I found it in a box of 45s, because it's so delightfully wrong. It opens with the fartiest trumpet note I've ever heard, and from there it lurches about in such top-heavy fashion I wonder quite what gravitational effect keeps it upright in the more precarious moments. Deft it is not. But as I always say of these later Elvis records, even at only two and a half minutes long you get a lot for your money.

Speaking of top-heaviness, the introduction to Jimmy Ruffin's "I'll Say Forever My Love" isn't something you'd want to see coming towards you on a sharp bend. It does settle down once it gets going into one of those rich and decadent Motown singles. It was originally released in 1968 but failed to get any further than #52; this reissue peaked at #7 in August '70.

Motown's stretch of reissues and held-back recordings continued with "Tears Of A Clown", recorded by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles way back in 1967 but only released in the UK in July '70. Perhaps this recycling hit an early '70s nerve, because it hit #1 in September. It's typical Motown, elaborate patisserie window centrepiece construction with a rhythm section so tight you wonder what they fastened it with.

Chicago return to the Top 40 in August with "25 or 6 to 4", one of those overgrown jam tracks. It was recorded in 1969 and in places sounds it, with a guitar solo which wouldn't sound out of place on Cream's "Disraeli Gears". I think that's sort of a compliment, maybe? The horns are quite a bit more current, and it went down well with buyers, reaching #7 by the end of the month.

Also entering the Top 40 in August are early '70s mainstay Bread, with "Make It With You". This is the softest of soft rock, taking the kind of tempo and laid-back feel of the kind of things the Flying Burrito Brothers were doing at the end of the '60s and removing any sense of pain or longing from it. The result is the most unobtrusive of background music, the kind of thing you'd put on very quietly before descending into your conversation pit for the evening. It peaked at #5 in September '70.

Rather more obtrusive is September '70 #3, "Mama Told Me Not To Come" by Three Dog Night. There was a strange obsession with recording covers of circa-1970 singles through the '90s, and so I first heard this via the cover on Tom Jones' covers, collaborations and comeback album "Reload". What's noticeable with the original is just how Tom Jones it is. The underpinnings may be scuzzy garage-style rock, but those big choruses and sudden turnarounds fit right in with the oeuvre. Imagine September #16 "I (Who Have Nothing)" sped up about about 33% and you'd be there.

Another byword for '70s naffness in my teenage years was Hot Chocolate. "You Sexy Thing" soundtracked just about everything in the '90s and early '00s, usually with a knowing wink of irony. That single is a story for later in the decade, but their first Top 40 entry is in August '70 with "Love Is Life", peaking at #6 in September. I've always felt this treatment was a bit unfair on Errol Brown and Tony Wilson's efforts, because these are well-crafted singles. Mickie Most (behind the production for Animals and Herman's Hermits) gave these a wonderful Motown-lite feel with string accents in all the right places.

I love how much these early-decade charts elevate both soul and reggae records. Desmond Dekker's cover of Jimmy Cliff original "You Can Get It If You Really Want" went to #2 in October '70, an infectiously happy and upbeat single. It blends reggae with soul, especially with those horns sounding like something you could imagine Motown doing. Although not with that wriggling bassline.

The big chart-topping hit of September '70 is pure soul, though. Other than an almost Beck era Yardbirds-esque guitar solo Freda Payne's "Band Of Gold" sounds like it could have been from 1964. It's Motown's finest writing partnership Holland-Dozier-Holland behind this, under a pseudonym thanks to legal troubles after departing that outfit in 1967, and you can hear it. Payne does a great job with the sort of pained, backward-looking vocal the trio used to give to Levi Stubbs.

Through all of this, rock continued to get harder and heavier. Deep Purple hit #2 in October with "Black Night", a record I first heard through one of those ridiculously weighty and muffled-sounding '70s jukeboxes they used to have in pubs before CD-based and then MP3-based systems took over. Now you have ones where you can select any song from the last 5 decades and have it played. I kind of miss being subject to the whims of whoever stocked the thing, with assembling a decent playlist feeling like a proper on-the-spot challenge.

"Black Night" would have gone well in a seedy dive bar where most of the evening is spent round an uneven, beer-stained pool table with a stack of coins on the side rail. It's a simple, repetitive groove - a record that's content to get in, do three and a half minutes of rocking, then exit without having to make any complicated statements.

At #4 in October '70 was one of the totems of early '70s hard rock, Black Sabbath's "Paranoid". Again, it's just one groove, this time not even reaching the three minute mark but being a solid assault for the time it does run. Critics of the time compared these singles to Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" as their frame of reference, although "Paranoid" is faster and tighter. It's one of the classic metal songs, a genre which would have surprisingly many encounters with the charts over its existence, to greater or lesser degrees of controversy. "Paranoid" being no stranger to this, being accused of encouraging suicide thanks to some misheard lyrics. Start, I guess, as you mean to go on.

At the extreme opposite to this hard rock sound is the Carpenters' "(They Long To Be) Close To You", an October '70 #6. It's an old Bacharach-penned number, and you can hear that heritage in it. It's the softest of the soft; while I was surprised to find how much edge remained in Mamas and Papas recording, a band frequently compared to duo Karen and Richard Carpenter, this is pure sweetness and innocence. I can't help but think it's less for it. For me, it's a little too sugary.

Replacing it in the #6 slot the following week was Diana Ross with "Ain't No Mountain High Enough". This is one of those records where you mostly only ever hear the chorus, and on listening to the full thing I'm struck by just how spare those verses are. Writers Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson saw this one as their ticket to Motown, which denied us of an intriguing suggestion: a 1966 version recorded by Dusty Springfield.

The obsession with Woodstock as a cultural touchstone of a musical generation began early, with Matthews' Southern Comfort taking "Woodstock" to the top of the charts at the end of October '70, little more than a year after the legendary music festival at which 450,000 people turned up to a farm in upstate New York and the Grateful Dead somehow made one song last 50 minutes. Songs about Woodstock seem to predate the festival itself, with British band Turquoise releasing excellent slice of freakbeat "Woodstock" a year before in 1968, although even at that point the area was known for small-scale folk festivals and being the base of Bob Dylan.

The version we have here was originally Joni Mitchell's, turning up as the B-side to "Big Yellow Taxi" earlier in the year. It paints the drive up to the festival as a spiritual journey, with the writer not even arriving until halfway through the song. Mitchell's version spawned a flurry of covers, of which this was the only one to see significant success in the UK. It's a hazy and soft record, as so many in these 1970 charts are.

One of Woodstock's performing alumni was Melanie, a singer-songwriter who was not originally scheduled to be on the bill, but got sent out after the Incredible String Band refused to play in the rain. Her cover of "Ruby Tuesday" hit #9 in November '70, with a vibrato reminiscent of Buffy Sainte-Marie (who we are yet to encounter in these charts, but was decently into a career as an album artist by 1970). Somehow Woodstock chronicle "Lay Down (Candles In The Rain)" never broke the Top 40 in the UK, despite it being Melanie's best-known record today.

"Lay Down" became popular as an anti-war song, but 1970 also gave us one of the most blatant anti-war statements, Edwin Starr's "War", which hit #3 in November '70 while asking "what is it good for? Absolutely nothin'!" It was originally a Temptations song, but this was the version with the intensity and the one which became a big hit, unexpectedly so for such a straightforward protest record in 1970.

Having mentioned protest songs and the work of Buffy Sainte-Marie, it's appropriate that a version of "Indian Reservation" hits #3 the week after "War", in this case Don Fardon's. As a song it had been floating around since 1959, and even this version was recorded back in 1968. It would be popped up by Paul Revere and the Raiders for a 1971 version which is better-known today, but this menacing and sparse version of the lament on the fate of the Cherokee nation is the only one to have an impact on the UK charts.

Entering the Top 40 at the end of October '70 is one of the iconic bands of the early '70s, T. Rex with "Ride A White Swan". T. Rex was a long time in formation, and frontman Marc Bolan had been trying to be a star since the mid '60s, along the way cutting some great freakbeat records during a brief tenure with John's Children. Disagreements over the production of "Midsummer Night's Scene" led him to form a psych-folk duo called Tyrannosaurus Rex in 1967, migrating toward a heavier and more straightforward rock focus in 1969 before contracting the band's name to T. Rex and releasing those glammed-up singles we all know and some of us love.

That the band had been nearly 4 years in the making shows, because they arrived with a sound that was fully formed and ready to roll from their very first hit. The band focused hard on the pop market, writing accessible lyrics and even reducing the prices of their concert tickets to attract a younger audience. It paid off, because this one went to #2 by January '71. Let's not talk about what kept it off the top spot. Well, at least not yet.

While not a huge hit, we can't talk about the pop charts without noting the record which would on and off be the theme for the BBC's Top of the Pops chart countdown, most notably returning for the '90s period during which I watched it most. CCS's mostly-instrumental cover of "Whole Lotta Love" hit #13 in November '70. The band itself was one of those studio projects, an assortment of session musicians loosely assembled around Alexis Korner and produced by the endlessly prolific Mickie Most.

#1 in November was sadly another posthumous hit, and it's a big loss: Jimi Hendrix died on 18th September after an overdose of prescription sleeping tablets. While "Voodoo Chile" is a recording from 1968 it's a fitting tribute; a cut-down version of a 15-minute live jam which starts with itchy guitar before diving into the relentless pummelling drive so many of the great early Hendrix singles had. Copies were issued in a picture sleeve with the lyric, "I stand up next to a mountain and chop it down with the ledge [sic] of my hand" printed on the front with an over-contrasted black and white photo of Hendrix behind them.

Hendrix's legacy was initially treated badly by Polydor, with tracks intended for a fourth album spread increasingly thinly over a series of exploitation albums, padded out with studio out-takes and goofing around on tape. By the time of 1975's "Crash Landing", session musicians who'd never even worked with Hendrix were being employed to overdub rough demos and make them sound suitably Hendrix-y to keep the cash machine churning.

Even in life Hendrix had suffered from this, with early recordings made with Curtis Knight released to cash in on his late '60s popularity, and it's no wonder that once the Hendrix estate regained control of his catalogue all of these were delisted, with only a hypothetical as-intended double length "First Rays of the New Rising Sun" album being released in 1997 and the other tracks being relegated to compilations explicitly stating they are comprised of studio out-takes and demos.

Me, I still miss the nicely-edited version of "Peter Gunn" from "War Heroes".

December #3 "Cracklin' Rosie" feels a little bit like bayou rock by way of Neil Diamond, although that may be me stretching a first impression just a little too far no matter how much the rhythm guitar sounds like it should sit behind John Fogerty singing some sort of thing about rain. By the standards of early '70s soft rock this is really nice, even if it does threaten to suddenly break out into "Sweet Caroline" in places. It's got that pop sensibility, but the one where people try to make singles with craft and care rather than riding whatever lazy gimmick appears to be current.

Chairmen of the Board are another of those acts associated with post-Motown Holland-Dozier-Holland, and my word does December '70 #5 "(You've Got Me) Dangling on a String" sound like some great lost Four Tops number. I skipped over August '70 #3 "Give Me Just A Little More Time", probably because I needed a little more time to discuss something else, but it's in a similar place. Sophisticated, smooth soul with slightly pained lyrics. I sometimes wish I hadn't tried to cover all of pop, so I could give these records more attention. What I'm saying here is they're good, if maybe not influential or reflective of some new and exciting thing happening.

The glammy T. Rex sound turns up on Dave Edmund's "I Hear You Knocking", a #1 at the end of November '70. He'd originally intended to record a cover of "Let's Work Together", and you can't half hear it. Instead he covered a 1955 Smiley Lewis record, originally written by Dave Bartholomew. I fear this may have been rather last-minute: lyrics aside, there's a lot more "Let's Work Together" in this than there is of that.

One advantage of starting out with an 11-year-old singer is they do improve quickly, and Michael is both a lot more capable and a lot less painful on the ear in late 1970 Jacksons outing "I'll Be There". There are still a fair few turns where I can't shake the feeling this is a rejected track from the Lion King in which Young Simba takes the vocal lead, but between Michael's greater confidence and Jermaine Jackson's counterpoint there's a lot more to like in this one. It peaked at #4 in January '71.

At #2 in December '70 was McGuinness Flint's "When I'm Dead And Gone", sounding a little like an early prototype for later Faces track "Ooh La La". That mandolin line makes it one of the first records to feature the instrument prominently. I rather like it, and it makes the case 1970 had a lot to offer beyond the obvious compilation candidates.

Entering the Top 40 for the first time in December '70 and rising to #8 is another notable '70s name, Gilbert O'Sullivan with "Nothing Rhymed". Having tried to launch his career by dressing like a 1920s urchin and deliberately cultivating a nerdy character there was an unwelcome whiff of the gimmick hanging over this one before I started listening to it, but it's really quite an enjoyable single.

My pick to close out the year is the Kinks with "Apeman", a satire on the back to the land movement hippy culture was gravitating toward and eventual January '71 #5. It's full of irresistably catchy hooks and signatures, with an underlying sense of fun. In a repeat of the band's other 1970 hit, some hasty re-recording took place after a few early listeners pointed out, "that doesn't quite sound like you're talking about pollution 'fogging' up your eyes, does it?"

1971

There's a line on my spreadsheet that's been filling me with dread, so I may as well get it out of the way now.

Hitting #1 in the first full week of January is Clive Dunn's "Grandad". If you had to pick a record to symbolise everything wrong with pop music in the 1970s, this would come very high up the list. A comedy actor sings a mawkish song about growing old assisted by a choir of noxiously fawning brats and a parping bassline even McCartney would have thought twice about putting on a mid-album filler track. He might still have done it anyway, but at least he'd have thought twice.

It is an unrelentingly horrible record. There is nothing to redeem it. That it got to #1 is part promotional artifice including radio DJ mentions and appearances on Basil Brush, part the enduring popularity of "Dad's Army" (in which Dunn played Lance Corporal Jones), and part a worrying portent that something is going to go deeply, deeply wrong in the world of record purchasing during this decade.

I can excuse many things. I can excuse people buying all those Template records well into the 1960s, because it was a popular music form and anyway it's not like I'm averse to buying a modern psychedelic rock record if someone makes one. I can excuse bubblegum novelties that are clearly aimed at young children, especially if they have the decency to be catchy and well-crafted. This, I cannot. I'm not saying eradicating it from history is top of my list of urgent time machine missions should I somehow come into possession of one, but it's definitely up there.

With this unwelcome noise still infecting my ears I move on to Judy Collins' "Amazing Grace", a record which was in the top 40 for pretty much the whole of 1971, with a peak position of #5 in February. It's a recording of "Amazing Grace". I don't know what more to say about it. You could hear this in any church near you, although most likely not entirely in tune and with a lot of people just mumbling the words and hoping nobody looks at them too closely.

Look, if you're going to play something in a church it should be Felius Andromeda's 1967 psych obscurity "Meditations", and indeed that's exactly what the band did, in case you've ever listened to that and wondered where they got the organ from.

In this company a relatively average Badfinger song is blessed release, and thankfully along comes "No Matter What", peaking at #5 in February '71. It's got some great guitar work, and while it's not their best it does show the band starting to move away from their Beatles-influenced origins to an identity which is more their own.

Also, it's not "Grandad".

Entering the Top 40 the same early January '71 week as "No Matter What" is one of those implausible things the charts like to throw at me every once in a while, Elvis recording a cover of Dusty Springfield's English-language version of "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me". It hit #9 toward the end of the month, but illustrates the perils of starting with such great source material: it's just not as good as the original. You can't improve on perfection, although I do feel that starting from that point the end result could have been a lot more gaudy fun than it is. Elvis had already given up on restraint, there's no point trying to wind things back now.

1971's procession of horrid songs continues with February #2 "Pushbike Song" by Australian band the Mixtures, a tiresome retread of "In The Summertime" with added sound effects. I didn't think I'd find myself missing the Mungo Jerry song quite so soon, or indeed at all. These are bad charts, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

At least at the end of January we get a decent #1, with George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" the first chart-topper from an ex-Beatle. The session credits read like a who's who of early '70s music, with Eric Clapton and Badfinger's Pete Ham turning up, Gary Brooker on piano and Ringo Starr joining Jim Gordon on drums. As the two lesser Beatles, Starr and Harrison maintained a working relationship, each helping out on the other's albums through the early '70s.

Part of Harrison's 1970s productivity is the huge number of songs he'd stored up, being restricted to only two contributions per album as part of the Beatles. 1970's "All Things Must Pass" was a triple album, running to over 100 minutes in total, and that was leaving out another two discs' worth of material which had been recorded in the studio. With the exception of the third disc containing instrumental jams, it also carried much more of a pop sensibility than Harrison's earlier experimental albums such as 1968's "Wonderwall Music" and 1969's Moog-driven "Electronic Sound".

Unfortunately the record ended up mired in lawsuits, due to Harrison subconsciously copying elements of the Chiffon's "I Feel Fine". Listen to that record again and you'll see it's an open and shut case. While at one point things looked close to being settled with 40 percent of the royalties going to rights owner Bright Tunes, this fell apart when the Beatles finally got rid of manager Allen Klein in 1973 resulting in Harrison eventually paying out 75% of the North American royalties from "My Sweet Lord", plus a further portion of those from "All Things Must Pass". It discouraged him from songwriting for quite some time, until a late '80s comeback.

It feels like 1971 isn't going to give me a break, with even great records dragged down by the bad luck stories associated with them. (I did tell you about Badfinger, right?). February #3 from one-hit wonders Ashton, Gardner and Dyke "Resurrection Shuffle" is a gimmick-laden mess of the type that finished off rock'n'roll as a going concern, and it's only a thin veneer of modernity which separates it from those records.

With a leaden sense of inevitability, as the incredible run of '68-'70 falls apart the Template is lurking in wait, ready to plod in with its workmanlike rhythms, its leaden tempos and its gratuitous use of strings. It really is one of the most enduring forms pop music ever created, and while the stats say #4 in February '71 you could place Perry Como's "It's Impossible" at any point between 1952 and here, even if it would have seemed unusually sophisticated prior to about 1957. Perhaps they got slightly better, as this feels a bit more listenable, or maybe I've just listened to a lot of bad records and more importantly aren't hearing this in the middle of 300 other things which sound near-identical.

For all of ten seconds "Baby Jump" sounds like it might be a decent Mungo Jerry single but then it all dissolves into silliness, cribbing a bunch of things from late-'50s rock'n'roll including flurry-of-note solos and so many piano rakes they start to become irritating. It went to #1 in March, because 1971 has decided to commit to a theme and that theme is awfulness. There's more than four minutes of this. I was hoping it had ended around the point of that "alright alright alright" gimmick.

The most charitable interpretation I can give is that both this and "In The Summertime" were maxi singles with two tracks on the 'A' side and an extended bonus track on the 'B' side, and British people always like a bargain.

I never thought of Elton John's UK chart debut "Your Song" as a record I'd particularly seek out to listen to, but seeing it in the tracklist amongst all these cheap and tawdry novelties I find myself doing exactly that. John originally gave it to Three Dog Night to record, but they decided he should have a chance to release it first as a single. It has a depth and subtlety which is quite out of step with everything around it. Elton John had spent a lot of years trying to have a hit single, and this was the one to finally break the charts. It went to #7 in February, and given what else is here I am pleased by this.

Lynn Anderson's "Rose Garden", a cover of a 1968 Joe South song, is a fun piece of country pop. Also if you ever wondered where people got that thing about promising rose gardens from, it's probably here. It hit #3 in March '71, although nearly never was; in the rather more sexist climes of Nashville in the early '70s, it was felt implausible that a woman would be the one promising all of these things.

At #8 in March was a late chart result for Neil Diamond's 1968 single "Sweet Caroline". You almost certainly know this one, and I find that weird. It seems to have come out of nowhere to become this chant that fills football stadiums, and certain sorts of bars play late in the evening to get everyone standing up and singing in one of those big group hugs that almost inevitably results in beer being spilt and repurchased. And yet a decade ago you wouldn't hear it anywhere. I think the only time I heard it in the wild in the 2010s was a French ski bar, and the playlists in those tend to be gleeful genre-defying anarchy at the best of times so you kind of expect it, most likely followed by Rage Against The Machine. Then five years later it's everywhere. Maybe a lot of influencers went to that same ski bar.

Topping those March '71 charts were T. Rex with "Hot Love". Musically it's about what you'd expect, but the important moment here is that when the band appeared on Top of the Pops they did so for the first time with Marc Bolan wearing sequins and makeup. It's a very subtle incarnation of the look and you'll have to squint to see it through the vintage TV resolution, but this would develop into the full glam rock style where you couldn't point a camera at the band without the picture dissolving into a mess of lens flare and overblown highlights.

One position lower was Paul McCartney with "Another Day". Lyrically it drew criticism for being an "Eleanor Rigby" with no real peril or reason for being so sad, but while it might not be one of the philosophical greats it's a lot less objectionable than I was expecting. It's an early '70s soft rock record with some pleasantly forward acoustic guitar. No marching band beats, no twee music hall nonsense, no nudge-wink lyrics, no minute of experimental nonsense at the end, just a solid record which does the job it's supposed to.

I could mention Ray Stevens' #2 "Bridget The Midget (The Queen Of The Blues)" but I'm utterly fed up with tedious novelty records so instead I'm going to give my time to The Sweet's "Funny Funny", because it's another one of those big early '70s names entering the Top 40 for the first time in March '71, with a slow rise to  #13 in May. It's a fun piece of bubblegum pop, and co-writer Michael Chapman later admitted he'd based it on "Sugar Sugar".

Elvis continued his new-found habit of recording those big-sounding mid '60s hits with a cover of "There Goes My Everything" which hit #6 in April '71. It ties things a bit more back to the Jack Greene country original, but this doesn't help it escape a consistently soporific feeling. It's far from essential given the Engelbert Humperdinck version, and I'm not exactly sure that's an essential record either.

'71 would see a hit from every ex-Beatle, and John Lennon's "Power to the People" illustrates my problem with his solo career by being the weakest of the three so far. It's got one idea, and I'm not sure even that is a great one. Even Lennon would admit to this not being one of his best, agreeing that this kind of naive hippy-era statement was past its best by the tail end of the '60s, let alone '71.

Olivia Newton-John had been drifting between acting roles in Australian TV and low-key record releases through the mid to late '60s, and in 1970 got caught up in one of Don Kirshner's attempts to create another multimedia success with a band called Toomorrow who starred in their own science fiction film and, naturally, had a soundtrack LP and a couple of singles. None were a success and instead she struck out on a solo career.

For all the dread that name may call up as one of the top tier '70s cliches, "If Not For You" is a fine Dylan cover, taking that record's laid-back nature and adding slide guitar, soft electric piano accents and some lovely electric guitar coming in midway through the runtime. Although this really owes a lot to the version it's a direct cover of: the one George Harrison put on "All Things Must Pass", which features most of the same elements, if a little rougher and therefore truer to Dylan's homespun original. Harrison really was underrated.

Hitting #1 going into May '71 was Dave & Ansell Collins with "Double Barrel". There are parts to like about this, particularly the instantly recognisable piano signature, but I fear that reggae is starting to be infiltrated by gimmickry. I guess it may as well give in, since so is everything else in the unfortunate pop world of 1971.

Displacing it from #1 a few weeks later was "Knock Three Times" by Dawn. It's another soft rocker, although firmly in pop territory with its deliberately catchy refrain about knocking on the various features of a block of flats with poor sound insulation to communicate romantic desire. This is the sort of thing we'd have mocked in the '90s as emblematic of '70s kitsch and musical slightness, but other than the sound effects being a little cringeworthy I find this enjoyable enough.

There is one last Beatle to tick off the list, and we get to do this with "It Don't Come Easy" entering the Top 40 in April '71 and peaking at #4 in May. One of the things which didn't come easy to Ringo Starr was songwriting, with erstwhile bandmate George Harrison stepping in to help with ideas and playing those great guitar lines which put me a little in mind of the Stone Roses.

It's a little uneven, although Ringo puts in some great drumming and there's a lot to like. It helps that you're likely to come to this with unfairly low expectations. Starr was always painted as the weak link of the Beatles, most likely by the kind of people who these days would be taking to the Internet to go, "uhm I don't think you're supposed to play drums like that". Of course anyone who's read this far without skipping over the bits about the '60s would know this is far from the truth, with Ringo's intriguing and off-kilter drumming often stepping in to save a pompously turgid McCartney composition. The style of which he mocked somewhat at the start of this single's B-side "Early 1970", a commentary on each of his former bandmates, which ends with the hope they will once more play together.

I'd count this as part a little fillip around the end of May, suggesting the public could still propel some great singles up the charts, including Rolling Stones classic "Brown Sugar" which hit #2 in May '71. It had been kicking around in want of a release since December 1969, although I'm not going to complain given what else is on offer.

Also with a link to 1969 and a sweetener-themed title is Sakkarin's cover of "Sugar Sugar" (#12 May '71). As with so much bubblegum pop, the band is a studio confection, being the work of Jonathan King of "Everyone's Gone To The Moon" fame as he moved toward record production. If you could still call this bubblegum pop. I love the absolute madness of this. It completely subverts the innocent catchiness of the original with a menacing drum intro and psychedelic guitar, taking nearly a minute and a half to get to any lyrics. At which point we get a delightfully sludgy rendition of the chorus, which can't even be bothered to utter "candy girl" before giving way to high-pitched guitar.

There's a clip of this being played on Top of the Pops which elevates a great single to an absolute experience, with cult-like dancing, students on their rag week all over the studio and the cameras cutting away to a wonderful assortment of people who really aren't sure what to make of it.

Excellent Motown back catalogue number "Heaven Must Have Sent You" by the Elgins went to #3 in June. This one had been hanging around since '66, although the popularity may have been helped by it being one of Northern Soul's defining records. Also, I don't know if you've noticed it or whether I may have mentioned it in passing, but nearly everything else in the charts this year is awful.

Tony Christie started 1971 with "Las Vegas" being a minor hit, and in June unexpectedly easy-listening revenge song "I Did What I Did For Maria" hit #2. It's rather late to the party with that Tom Jones lite format, but largely inoffensive and enjoyable. Most of Christie's chart success would be the small flurry of singles from 1971, but he seemed to be one of those acts who just kept going whether or not they were seeing success (and of course was in a largely album-oriented genre, which we wouldn't see from these singles charts).

The Temptations reached #8 in July '71 with "Just My Imagination", a sleepy number which owes rather a debt to the brothers Gibb. There's something annoyingly inconsequential about this for me, there's a bunch of elements which feel like they ought to combine into something good but never rise above just another early '70s soft pop record.

Even Elvis gets a "could try harder" for June #9 "Rags to Riches", a slight minute and fifty-five which has the occasional hint of promise but largely fails to hide that Elvis just wanted to get this 1970 recording session over and done with as quickly as possible.

It's with trepidation that I approach another one of those infamous pieces of 1970s kitsch, "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" (#1 June '71) . Even Middle Of The Road felt bad about recording it. I will say, there's about 30 seconds near the start where it feels like this might be a reasonable piece of bubblegum pop but then the chorus starts and you realise what you have is a really bad version of Little Eva's "Locomotion" with stupid lyrics.

Somehow this contrived to be one of those chart-dominating monsters, shifting more than 10 million copies making it one of the best-selling singles in the world ever. At least we dragged other countries down with us: this was a worldwide phenomenon. It doesn't even have the grace to be offensively bad - merely, and I guess I have to use this pun, middle of the road.

A record now perhaps more famous for being sampled and covered than it is in its own right is John Kongos' July '71 #4 "He's Gonna Step On You Again". Kongos had spent the '60s drifting around in psychedelic bands Floribunda Rose and Scrugg, finding time to record the excellent "Will the Real Geraldine Please Stand Up and Be Counted" along the way before an early solo career consisting mostly of pastoral, folk-tinged records. Which makes the heavy, glammy "He's Gonna Step On You Again" with its "Come Together"-style word soup even more of an oddity. At least it's interesting.

Sweet's "Co-Co" (#2 July '71) is a somewhat uneasy combination of glam rock and calypso. It works much like a pineapple and crisp sandwich, which is to say that while I'm sure someone somewhere will claim to like it, it's all a bit of a soggy mess that's made the bread go weird.

Lobo's "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo" (#4 July '71) was the artist's debut single, and is a surprisingly decent slice of soft rock with a little tinge of country here and there.

British reggae band Greyhound reached #6 in July with "Black and White", which is one of those "almost" records for me; it feels like there's something great the band came tantalisingly close to, and yet walked out of the studio with little more than a simplistic message of social harmony set to a functional but largely unexciting reggae backdrop.

Novelty songs continue to lurk in the shadows, with St. Cecilia's "Leap Up And Down (Wave Your Knickers In The Air)" reaching #12 in July.

Thankfully the end of July brings a #1 single worth listening to. John Peel may not have liked it much, but T. Rex's "Get It On" is an iconic '70s sound, rumbling bass and upfront drums punctuated by staccato guitar beeps. I bet this sounded great on a jukebox.

Also arriving on the charts for the first time in July '71 are Slade, with all the grace and style of someone handbrake-turning into the pub car park in a bright green Austin 1100. With hand-painted flames up the side. Which is to say of "Get Down and Get With It" that it's Slade. You know what you're going to get. Maybe it's a little more pub rock at this point, a bit more obvious that there's a piano in there being both boogied and woogied, but the simple unpretentious noise that would be the band's hallmark is all present and correct. Even if it only made it to #16.

I mentioned the Seekers a few times during the '60s as reliable purveyors of wistful folk. At the end of the '60s ex-member Keith Potger decided to set up a new incarnation in London, with a more pop focus. In a fit of creativity, this new Seekers was called The New Seekers. Somehow they ended up with a TV show courtesy of Scottish Television, although this was far from Monkees levels of popularity with most of the people who watched it ringing up to complain about the band. A retool of the band line-up followed, with a single released in 1971.

"Never Ending Song Of Love" (#2 August '71) suggests the main question the band answered was, "what if The Seekers... but bad?" It's a Delaney & Bonnie cover, a band whose version is okay as a low-key version of that kind of ensemble "Give Peace A Chance" thing, but this somehow manages to grate at me in a way the original doesn't. It's wracked with an entirely unnecessary jauntiness, and is teeth-grittingly reminiscent of Marmalade's cover of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da". Please, the 1970s, what sins have I committed that have made you buy all these awful records to punish me?

1971 isn't all bad, though. It's the year of "Who's Next", and The Who's excellent "Won't Get Fooled Again", which released in advance of the album and went to #9 in August. The band's tendency toward increasingly elaborate rock operas put them at odds both with fans who just wanted to see them smash stuff up and their management, and this reached a peak with "Lifehouse", an elaborate follow-up project to "Tommy" set in a dystopian future. It fell apart under the weight of its own complexity, being so high-concept Pete Townshend couldn't figure out how to explain it to anyone else. "Who's Next" was an attempt to salvage what work had already been done, and yet it's hard to imagine a more perfect album for the times: a selection of largely straightforward, hard-rocking songs, big runtimes, and a synthesiser - something about to become a big and often controversial part of the decade's music.

One of the earliest experimenters with synthesisers was Buffy Sainte-Marie, whose 1969 album "Illuminations" was full of pioneering synth work and experimental sounds which could have been at home on mid-'70s Doctor Who. It hits perfectly that junction between otherworldly strangeness and down-home simplicity that later Jefferson Airplane aimed at and so often missed. It was also just that little bit too weird, both for the record-purchasing public of 1969 and for music historians who don't like it when pioneering moments come without a male name on the cover.

While a great musical statement, record company Vanguard lost a lot of money on it and demanded Sainte-Marie come up with something far more commercial as a follow-up. The result was 1971's "She Used To Wanna Be A Ballerina", full of soft ballads with covers of Leonard Cohen and Neil Young songs.

It featured "Soldier Blue", the title song from the film of the same name. A double protest, both about the Vietnam War and the treatment of native Americans in their own country, it still managed to chart in July '71, eventually rising to a peak of #7 in September and spending 14 weeks in the Top 40. Vanguard even optimistically issued "Illuminations" for the first time in the UK in '71 in response, although it was inevitably outsold by the following year's local reissue of 1968 Buffy-in-Nashville album "I'm Gonna Be A Country Girl Again".

Of all things to be reissued and chart in 1971, we had Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" hitting #10 in August '71, paired with "Hound Dog" and "Don't Be Cruel" as a budget maxi-single. Reissue labels and imprints had somewhat of a day in the sun through the 1970s, with old rock'n'roll tracks frequently turning up on the charts. While the cynic in me says it's not like there was much else good to buy, I suspect the real reason is more to do with bargain-basement pricing; indeed, RCA issued this Elvis re-release in a sleeve proudly boasting "3 golden oldies for only 50p".

#1 in August was Diana Ross's "I'm Still Waiting", a saccharine-laden creation putting me in mind of one of those dresses with far too many frills and layers, the ones which sort of resemble a wedding cake. Tony Blackburn apparently campaigned for its release, the original intention being for it to remain an album track.

The Northern Soul scene got its word in by helping send 1964 cut "Hey Girl Don't Bother Me" by The Tams to #1 in September. Personally, I think that scene had some far more stomping floor-fillers to pick from. This one is a bit too laid-back and slow, sweet as the vocal is. Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up" is the more enduring soul number from these charts, even if it's really just an extended jam harking back to the days of "What'd I Say".

At #5 in September are the Pioneers with the upbeat and joyous "Let Your Yeah Be Yeah", a record that showed the band starting to really understand pop sensibilities, after all those early years using the recorded form to complain about how much money Long Shot had just lost them.

As ever with this journey, I need to make another whiplash turn to the serious, as 1971 was the year of the Bangladesh Liberation War and the resulting human rights abuses that were part of the Pakistan government's retaliatory crackdown, on top of debilitating floods the previous year. George Harrison and Ravi Shankar decided to organise a concert in response, both to raise awareness and to fund relief efforts.

Benefit concerts had existed for centuries, but through the '60s most of these were small affairs for a local and often relatively minor cause, such as 1967's 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, a London event to raise money for consistently police-harrassed underground newspaper the International Times. Even if the original run International Times did still eventually fold in 1973 after declining sales and the British state's evident malicious delight in persecuting anyone gay or gay-friendly (the paper was finally done in by being prosecuted for running contact ads), we did at least come out of it with a documentary film, a really rather good Syn single in the shape of "14 Hour Technicolour Dream" and years of fun from the inconsistent use of the American or British spelling of "colour" when referring to it.

The Concert for Bangladesh was something else. A huge, two-show event at Madison Square Garden, featuring a Who's Who of the early '70s (if not the actual Who, although Keith Moon did turn up at the afterparty to smash up a drum kit): Harrison, Dylan, Clapton, Ringo Starr, Billy Preston and our favourite tragic and long since forgotten band of these times, Badfinger. In typical can't-catch-a-break fashion, they were the owners of said drum kit. The IRS ruined proceedings a bit by holding back much of the money due to messy finances resulting in the festival being denied tax-exempt status (a problem which similarly blighted the triple LP released in the UK), although by the mid '80s a total of $12m had made its way to Bangladesh.

Prior to all of this we got a Harrison single, "Bangla Desh". Released at the end of July, it only started climbing the charts a couple of weeks after the concert on 1st August, peaking at a mere #10. A far cry from the monster media event charity singles have become in our time! Listening to it now, it perhaps belies that it was hastily assembled with Harrison dashing between London, New York and Los Angeles trying to organise a concert at the same time, but this is still him at his creative peak and we can forgive an unfocused jam section here or there if it's for a good cause.

Glance a little down the charts and we find Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood with "Did You Ever", on its way to an eventual late September #2. That's some prime interrupting from Nancy in the first couple of lines! As so often with Nancy & Lee, they sound like they're having a tremendous amount of fun. It's more straight-up country veering toward the countrypolitan than the some of the outright weirdness to be found on earlier cuts like 1967's (sadly non-charting in the UK) "Some Velvet Morning" but don't let that detract from the enjoyment to be had here.

Another slow riser (#4 October '71) is James Taylor's "You've Got A Friend". Not in me, it's not that record. This one was written by Carole King, an album-only track from 1971's "Tapestry". This is one of those super-soft acoustic numbers which keep surfacing in these early '70s charts. I can't say I blame anyone who bought it. There are far worse things bobbing around on the surface.

Let us look upward to #1 though, because early October brings one of those era-defining records and artists: Rod Stewart with "Maggie May". Stewart was a protégé of Jeff Beck, himself of superstar factory the Yardbirds. The early '70s was a busy time for him, launching both a solo careeer and joining the post-Marriott Small Faces, who decided they'd achieved a certain bigness of face by this point and would call themselves just Faces.

"Maggie May" is a pretty good record. I know everyone'd probably love me to put the boot in here, but it's nicely put together with the bright acoustic guitar and organ line running throughout, and Stewart does have one of those gravel-gargling rock singer voices which just works for this kind of laid-back '70s-ness. Except I've led you up the path here.

"Maggie May" is not "Maggie May". It's the B-side to a single called "Reason To Believe", Mercury Records believing this was more appropriate for the early '70s market. Listen to both back to back and you can see what they were getting at - the lesser-known A-side is at once both bolder sounding and yet also more laid back, echoing "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo" with those country-at-times turns and sleepy nature.

Once it was in the hands of radio DJs it was the flip side which they preferred, and it became so well-known even the official charts list it as a double A-side despite the very large and obvious "B" sitting on the preferred-side label of UK copies.

We're getting one of those little batches of '70s names in these charts, because down at #8 at the end of September are Hot Chocolate with "I Believe (In Love)". This is an example of a band slowly developing into their signature sound; this one is slow and it's got an almost Delrons-like guitar line, but the strings are there and if you're familiar with the more famous works of Hot Chocolate you can hear it starting to come together.

At #2 in October are Middle Of The Road attempting to repeat their earlier chart-storming antics with more of the same sensible song, silly chorus formula in "Tweedle Dee Tweedle Dum". Not without success; this is #2 after all. Musically? Well, I didn't start properly gritting my teeth until that a capella bit in the last third. Middle Of The Road may apparently be a mission statement as much as a band name, but at least they're less irksome than most of Mungo Jerry's output.

Then we have the first entry from heavyweight contenders for the crown of '70s naffness, the Bay City Rollers with "Keep On Dancing" (#9 October '71). Rollermania is a well-trodden Greatest Hits of everything wrong with the '70s: bizarre crazes, inappropriate tartan, flares, jumpsuits, Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads haircuts and above all awful, awful music. Or so they say.

But that is yet to come, and the Rollers spent a surprisingly long time paying their dues, having played friends' weddings and dance halls since 1964 with founding members Alan and Derek Longmuir. And 1971 was not their breakthrough year either, with "Keep On Dancing" followed by a string of non-charting singles, none of which were apparently recorded by the band themselves.

All of this, and I have never previously listened to a Bay City Rollers record. It's not the done thing, really. "Keep On Dancing" is a cover of a 1965 record by the Gentrys, and comes across like someone trying to create a generic version of a Monkees single without understanding that those things are made as much by the interplay of a dozen extremely talented session musicians as they are the happy, fun-time feel and jaunty beat. "Keep On Dancing" has only the latter of these things. I wouldn't say it's offensive, more that it's just bland, not saved from this fate even by a clumsy fade and last-minute key change. If you have a similar 40 year streak of never having listened to the Bay City Rollers, it's certainly not worth breaking it for this.

I have just as much ire for Redbone's "The Witch Queen Of New Orleans", deposing Middle Of The Road from the #2 slot at the end of October. I wanted to like this band, but my word is this a boring single. It's the worst of what I might have called dad music as a kid, if my dad hadn't been busy introducing me to Thunderclap Newman, the Small Faces and the current dead/alive status of all their members. A featureless carpet of bluesy, CCR-ish rock that just goes on and on and on without ever getting anywhere interesting. The immediate mental image I get from it is a slipper-clad foot tapping slightly out of time as someone prepares a lecture about how Suede couldn't ever make anything like this.

Too right, straw dad. Suede are far more interesting than that.

Another record which doesn't really go anywhere is "Sultana" by Titanic. This is altogether too funky to play the dad circuit though, mixing Vanilla Fudge style organ with that kind of emblematic TV detective bow-chicka funk guitar. Yes, I know the other thing that guitar is famous for soundtracking. Let's keep it clean here. It's little more than a jam, although at one point threatens to break out into an almost Telstars-esque instrumental riot before sadly settling down into what is really just a less good "Zabadak!"

At #4 in November '71 we have Al Green's "I'm So Tired Of Being Alone", and blimey Texas didn't half rip this off for "Say What You Want". I don't entirely blame them; this is a great soft soul record and that is a good guitar line. And if you're in any doubt that's where they got the idea from, they covered this exact record in both 1992 and 2000 complete with that guitar line. I guess it's just that good.

While I've got the chance to pick out a few things I enjoy, I ought to mention Joan Baez's November #6 "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", a late '60s Band number which fits that soft early '70s sound perfectly. Baez records can be a little... piercing at times, but this is one of the few times I'll tell you the edges have been rounded off and it's a better record for it. That descending organ line would turn up again on contemporary Baez/Morricone collaboration "Here's To You", non-charting in the UK but let's not hold that against it.

Tom Jones! A man who I think is earning an exclamation mark around this parts. In one sense November #2 "Till" is a soppy old mess of a record, and it isn't half leaning over the Template's shoulder and copying answers, but I think it's starting to cross over to that point I just enjoy marvelling at how the hell an edifice like that remains upright.

If the ornament and twiddly bits of Tom's latest have left you in doubt about the '70s of wide trousers and narrow tastes having started, allow Slade to come along and dispel that notion with their first #1, "Coz I Luv You". Well, sort of. Other than the haphazard spelling, it's surprising just how un-Slade it is; even the band didn't like it. It comes in like a menacing "Hi-Ho Silver Lining" and then just builds on that stomp, adding the kind of discordant violin you'd normally expect to be selling fewer than 1,000 copies on a Velvet Underground record. I'm amazed something this weird sold so well, let alone that Slade recorded it.

The '70s obsession with terrible novelty records continues with Piglets' "Johnny Reggae", a #3 in November and seemingly determined to be as horrid a record as possible even before you start wondering whether it has some slightly racist undertones. Probably someone found this funny in whatever desolate comedy wasteland existed in the tail end of 1971. Were the Pythons not on that week or something? I say "someone", this is one of Jonathan King's many pseudonymous acts and not one of the good ones.

I've mentioned how The Doors struggled to break the UK charts unless someone else was singing their songs at the same time, but "Riders On The Storm" did break on through to #22 at the start of December. They really don't help their case against being a lounge band by the single edit starting with vibes, of all things. I don't mind it, and I'd rather listen to this 100 times than hear that awful Piglets record again even once, but I still can't shake the feeling this has that casual backgroundability you'd want from an easy-listening record. The Doors, once again producing the world's most dangerous café music.

These are not good charts to be looking at, though. John Kongos' "Tokoloshe Man" has some jukebox-pounding presence at #4, but then above that we've got Cilla Black. T. Rex are at #2, but then "Jeepster" is one of my least favourite records of theirs, all that glam guitar with nothing really to hang it on. Then hitting #1 in December we have yet another novelty record.

At which point I throw away whatever credibility I have remaining, because that record is Benny Hill's "Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)" and I have a bit of a soft spot for it. I know, not just a novelty record but a saucy comedy novelty record, two of the worst elements of '70s entertainment combined in a 17-and-a-bit centimeter disc of vinyl. Look, it's got charm, right? Besides, it was never released with cynical intentions, just as a silly bit of fun, and it becoming Christmas #1 was a surprise to everyone involved.

While we're talking novelty singles, I may as well bring up one which became a novelty after the fact, thanks to a mid-2000s Comic Relief reissue. But in '71, Tony Christie's "(Is This The Way To) Amarillo" was entirely serious. Well, maybe not entirely. This is the "I Did What I Did For Maria" guy, after all. Ooh, and we're firmly in "too much" territory here, what with all those "sha-la-la"s and dramatic gear changes. I do like this. Shame it peaked at only #18.

I may as well complete the run with Jonathan King's "Hooked On A Feeling", a minor hit (#23 December '71) that probably owes much of its rescue from obscurity to Ally McBeal and then Guardians of the Galaxy. But let's be honest here, that "ooga-chaka" thing gets grating pretty quickly, doesn't it?

Elvis turned up in December to tide us over with a live recording of "I Just Can't Help Believin'", complete with some laughter from the audience and a vocal stumble early on. This one doesn't half work to win you back though, teasing the idea of turning on all the taps, getting so close to it and then backing away with a smile or a softly-spoken "sing the song, baby". Sadly it never quite does. Maybe if it had it'd have peaked higher than #6, relatively low by Elvis standards.

We close out '71 with Isaac Hayes' "Theme From Shaft" (#4 December '71), a record which always feels longer than its mere three minutes. It's an overgrown detective stakeout, with that infamous call-and-response establishing exactly who this "Shaft" guy is anyway. John Shaft, as we find out shortly before what sounds an awful lot like the Pearl & Dean advertising reel fanfare starts.