FIRST HOUR
Time (Clock of The Heart) (Culture Club)
(1982)... Boy George and co at their brilliant best, Top 3 follow up to their chart-topping debut Do You Really Want To Hurt Me
I Am The Beat (The Look) (1981) .... stomping good fun from The Look who hailed from Ely, Cambridgeshire. Although they never managed to replicate the Toip 10 success of this, their debut single, they unexpectedly reformed in the '00s with a well received new album
Floy Joy (The Supremes)
... on top form, in typically toe tapping style, with a song penned by William 'Smokey' Robinson, in our first featured year,
A Mersey Sound connection
A Little Loving (The Fourmost)
(1964) ... second of two Top 10-ers, although they also managed four lower placed chart entries
I'm The One (Gerry & The Pacemakers)
(1964)... after famously netting a hat-trick of number ones with their first three singles, Gerry had to make do with a # 2, held off the top spot by... fellow Scousers The Searchers (Needles and Pins) and Cilla Black (Anyone Who Had A Heart)
--------------------------------------
In These Shoes (Kirsty MacColl)
(2000) ... instantly engaging 'storytelling' song ~ a testament to the wonderfully creative talents of one of our finest singer-songwriters. In These Shoes is from Kirsty's final album Tropical Brainstorm released a few months before she died in a freak boating accident. Disappointingly, it only just scraped into the Top 100, but would become increasingly familiar in the years which followed. The trumpet-based tune featured in a sportswear ad and has been used as incidental or background music in several TV shows.and most famously was adopted as the theme tune for Catherine Tate's BBC sketch show
Newsround pre-Tameside: 50 years ago ~ 1972
Son of My Father (Chicory Tip)
... famously one of the first hit singles to feature a Moog synthesizer, which in this case was programmed and played by studio engineer and record producer Chris Thomas (although when they appeared on Top of the Pops, it was studio musician Trevor Bastow at the console). The single topped the chart for three weeks in February and by July had sold over one million copies. Much of the credit for its massive success goes to producer and manager Roger Easterby who happened to hear an advance copy of Son of My Father by the writers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte. Convinced of its potential, he secured the option for Chicory Tip to cut their own version in competition with the original [W]
Say You Don't Mind (Colin Blunstone)
... first of two solo hits within the space of a few months - I Don't Believe In Miracles was the follow-up - by the singer who had first found fame in the mid '60s with The Zombies
Brand New Key (Melanie)
... gentle bicycling, roller skating original version of what later became a rumbustious, rustic sing-a-long ~ The Wurzels' Combine Harvester Song (1976, # 1). By the time Brand New Key topped the US chart and made the Top 5 here, Melanie Safka was already a prolific songwriter. Artists from Ray Charles to The New Seekers covered What Have They Done to My Song, Ma ( aka Look What They've Done To My Song, Ma) As a performer, Melanie's only other major success in the UK was her version of an already famous song, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' Ruby Tuesday (1970, # 9), [W]
Telegram Sam (T Rex)
... third of four number 1s in just over 12 months for Marc Bolan and co in the heyday of both glam rock - and the maxi-single. Telegram Sam was the first release on Marc Bolan's own T Rex Wax Co label. When you flipped it over, there were two songs on the B side, Cadillac and Baby Strange. The previous year's album Electric Warrior had made a huge impact and further success was to follow with The Slider which included two chart-toppers Telegram Sam and Metal Guru, securing Bolan's place in pop history as the godfather of glam
Without You (Nilsson) . .. five weeks at # 1, one of the year's biggest selling singles, a classic love ballad and one of the stand-out songs of the '70s, written by Pete Ham and Tom Evans ~ their band Badfinger had previously recorded it in 1970 as an album track. Many other versions followed with Mariah Carey repeating Nilsson's chart-topping success in 1994
Look Wot U Dun (Slade)
... second of their deliberately mis-spelled hits, following the previous year's chart topper Coz I Luv You
Day By Day / Godspell medley (Holly Sherwood)
... American rock vocalist, who would later be best known for her work with Jim Steinman, providing backing vocals on the album he produced for Bonnie Tyler, Faster Than The Speed of Night (1983). Back in '72 she was embarking on a solo career ~ Day By Day, from the Broadway musical Godspell was her debut single, produced by Tony Orlando, best known as the front man of the mega-successful '70s chart group Dawn [W]
-------------------------------------
SECOND HOUR
Baby's Coming Back (Jellyfish)
(1991)... American power pop band peaked at # 51 with a song which proved a perfect fit for one of the UK's toppermost 21st Century pop combos McFly (2007, # 1)
Old Town (Philip Lynott)
(1982) ... the Thin Lizzy frontman wrote the Dublin-inspired song for his solo LP The Philip Lynott Album, which also included the Top 20 single - and Top of the Pops theme - Yellow Pearl. Old Town was covered in 2005 by The Corrs - an equally fine version which I've played on the show several times over the years
Sweet Nothins (Brenda Lee)
... teaser track for our second featured year ~the debut hit by 'Little Miss Dynamite'
Absolutely Lyricless ~ the instrumental break
Shindig (The Shadows)
(1963) ... four years on from their first chart success, those lyricless hits kept on coming for Messrs Marvin, Welch and Bennett. One their hits backing Cliff Richard is the last on the list later on....
A Walk In The Black Forest (Horst Jankowski)
(1965) ... classically trained pianist from Germany, best known as an easy listening pop composer. Ein Schwarzwaldfahrt, to give its original title in his native language, has been covered by many other recording artists, keyboard players especially
---------------------------
Half A Minute (Matt Bianco)
(1984) ... there was no Matt, as in a specific person - it's just the made-up name of the mostly male band who had a handful of hits in a style best described as Latin flavoured jazz pop. Here it's Basia, the group's sole female on lead vocal
The Village Green Preservation Society (Kate Rusby)
(2006) ... written by Ray Davies of The Kinks ~ the original version was the title track of the band's 1968 album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. Kate Rusby, one of the leading lights of the English folk scene recorded her version in 2006 as the theme for a BBC comedy Jam and Jerusalem. It was included as a bonus track on her album Awkward Annie
Newsround pre-Tameside: 62 years ago ~ 1960
How About That? (Adam Faith)
... having started the new decade at No. 1 with What Do You Want , he had an unstoppable run of five monster-size hits during the year, all of them making the Top 5 and including a second chart topper Poor Me
Colette (Billy Fury)
... Billy's biggest hit to date, his first time in the Top 10 with a song he wrote himself
Fings Ain't Wot They Used T' Be (Max Bygraves)
... a cheery look at the changing scenes of life all around as a new decade dawned and a new era began to unfold, sung by one of Britain's biggest stars and written by Lionel Bart, best known for his stage musicals, ~ including, most famously, Oliver! which had its London premiere in the same year. The line 'they changed our local Palais into a bowling alley' was cross referenced more than 20 years later by Ray Davies in The Kinks' Come Dancing (1983)
Sixteen Reasons (Connie Stevens)
... singer and song destined in rhyme for each other ~ her one and only chart appearance here and by far her greatest success in the US (# 9 and # 3 respectively)
A Mess of Blues (Elvis Presley & The Jordanaires)
... fresh from his US army service, Elvis was back with a sequence of 1960 singles which reached # 3, # 2 and # 1 ~ A Mess of Blues was the one in the middle, between Stuck On You and It's Now Or Never
Because They're Young (Duane Eddy)
... lyricless bonus which almost cries out for lyrics to sing along to ~ no surprise then, to discover a vocal version by James Darren made the chart soon afterwards. As heard on a recent show, Helen Shapiro also recorded the song for her debut album. A few years on, Duane Eddy's uplifting instrumental was adopted by Johnnie Walker as his theme tune on the offshore pirate station Radio Caroline and later on BBC Radio One
Do You Mind (Anthony Newley)
... just three months into the new decade, the acclaimed singer, actor and writer who was a huge influence on the young David Bowie had his second No.1 of the year
Please Don't Tease (Cliff Richard & The Shadows)
,,, after two No.1s the previous year this one made it a hat trick ~ by the end of the year The Shads had also topped the chart in their own right with Apache, first of their long run of instrumental hits over the next few years
---------------------------
SHOW THEME:
Rhapsody In Blue (Rick Wakeman)
written by George Gershwin, arranged by Tony Visconti
from the album Rhapsodies (A&M Records, 1979)
[W]: Source: Wikipedia
Please bear in mind: it's a live show and so, occasionally I might need to change the running order, leave a song out, or play an unplanned extra song which will not be shown in this weekly music blog.
If you missed any of the show, you can catch up online after 15:00 on Sunday 13/03/2022:
