AFAIK that info isn’t available online or in print. It would be nice if someone could compile it in book form since on a 1974 level alone it would bring whole shoals of other records into the reckoning, from Junior Byles’ “Curly Locks” to John Cale’s “The Man Who Couldn’t Afford To Orgy.”

I seem to recall Top of the Pops still only showing the top 30 until some point in the 80s maybe when they went up to 40? Is that right?recollection

The most arduous climb perhaps goes to The New Seekers, a year earlier, who also debuted at 40 but took 5 weeks to crawl to the top.

Too much time on my hands? Yessiree.

Then I heard it again, all over the place, in Christmas 2001 and suddenly I loathed and despised them for making a joke out of it since I was living (if you could call it “living”) through it.

These days I think it was a double bluff; the comedy used as a mask for an extremely grim and bleak song (”when we were here”).

Elvis, incidentally, was also riding high in the charts at the same time with his lachrymose rendition of the Martin/Coulter weepie “My Boy” though really the song needs Richard Harris’ deliberate overkill.

Showaddywaddy and Shaky I’ll talk about when we come to them.

“Lonely This Christmas” for me is a classic Christmas song as it works on a number of levels. There’s a line in “The History Boys” that I can’t quite remember – no doubt someone can help – about schoolboys being too young to appreciate some of the emotions portrayed in literature. Similarly, at age 12 I hadn’t loved and lost anyone, hadn’t lost a close family member and had no reference point to the subject of the song, but still found it moving and still do now that I’ve had those experiences. This from a band who performed it on TOTP with Les Gray singing to a ventriloquist’s dummy of himself while other band members pour washing powder over him from the top of a stepladder. To be able to play it for laughs and still move people, that’s a rare thing.

BTW, not only did it deny “Wombling Merry Christmas” top slot, it denied Bachman Turner Overdrive’s poptastic meisterwerk its due recognition as well!

(also: yes, i think shakin stevens is — or feels — curiously anomalous whoever you line him up against*… essentially he’s a down-the-line pub-rock tribute artist who was also a fairly effective “authentic” pop-star, by which i mean engagingly down-to-earth man-of-the-people anti-glam… his version of escape-into-the-past is a sort of return-to-antiromantic-unpretension) (*except paul young maybe?)

(oops this is rather messin with marcello’s NO SPOILERS dictum, isn’t it?)

i was always heartened by that joint project showaddywaddy did with einsturzende neubauten, but i can’t recall if anything lasting came of it

(i am on an anti-google day)

(the disconnect between the pre and post punk waves can be judged from the fact that the successful pre-punk 50s-revivalists got NO secondary boost at at all from the post-punk burst of interest…)

glam very specifically and deliberately broadened the event-horizon of pop backwards beyond the amnesia of the beatles-big-bang — like uk pop art (in particular richard hamilton* and peter blake) it used the matter of earlier unreflective fan-material as its subject, playing off the instant response of the listener against the knowing response of the connoisseur, or something like that; it was pop with a sense of history, which is unusual and quite daring (and tricky to sustain)

*hamilton was bryan ferry’s mentor, and ferry took the concept of historical awareness back to cole porter, which meant taking it a long way beyond the amnesia of the ELVIS-big-bang — of course he also made everything sound like bryan ferry, which is a problem or a triumph (yr mileage may vary)

the post-punk 50s revival was also much more self-consciously subcultural — kind of “we are we are we the mods” except for being teds…

Later you would also have acts such as Darts and Showaddywaddy, ending up with Stray Cats and Shakin’ Stevens in the early 80s before people were definitely finished with the 50s once and for all.

That being said, “Lonely This Christmas” has more in common with Elvis’ early 60s MOR incarnation than his 50s rock’n'roll one.

Geir H (#7) - Yes, the fact that Wimbledon’s finest were denied by this miserable garbage continues to rankle me into my maturity. Still, I guess nobody died…oh wait, Les Gray did, didn’t he?!

May I just say to Erithian and Marcello that I am appending this on Boxing Day Afternoon and that I was driving around earlier today and swore blind that I more than one spotted “Boxing Day Bobby” going about his reprehensible but nevertheless profitable business.