I give marks out of 10 to every song – based on whatever criteria you like, here’s your opportunity to say what you’d have given more than 6 to from 1976. Tick as many as you like.
Loading ...And use the comments to discuss the year as a whole, if you like.
Tom in FT /Popular • Pop/popular year poll • 8,405 views
All, 1–25, 26–50, 51–75, 76–100, 101–125, 126–150, 151–175, 176–200, 201–225, 226–250, 251–275, 276–300, 301–325, 326–350, 351–375, 376–400, 401–425, 426–450, 451–475, 476–524.Back up to post. More comments: All, 1–25, 26–50, 51–75, 76–100, 101–125, 126–150, 151–175, 176–200, 201–225, 226–250, 251–275, 276–300, 301–325, 326–350, 351–375, 376–400, 401–425, 426–450, 451–475, 476–524.
All the UK number ones since 1952, reviewed in order and rated by whim. As featured on Radio 2, The Times, Metro, Paul Cornell's LiveJournal, etc etc.
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Index of reviews and scores so far
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Popular Lucky Dip (a random post)
I’m just following the Swede’s lead. My heart belongs to Cherry.
You’ll have to ask the Swede. You won’t find me calling Sue Menhenick “Mucky” at all – so if she ever reads this thread she’ll ditch those other losers and head my way! Pub trivia bit care of Dr Google – she was born in Benghazi, where her parents were stationed with the British Army, and she’s now happily married with two children and living n London. Good luck to her and thanks for the effect she had on my generation…
(And while I’m on, that quote about Kursaals singer Paul Shuttleworth above was one I passed on to Jimmy from elsewhere. I’m in no position to call anyone pig-ugly!)
* Never knowingly heard the Tommy Hunt song before – loved the extremely elaborate and busy strings – surely that was the usual BBC orchestra? I’ll have to download the original and compare it.
*I remember that appearance by Jethro Tull well I think what appeared to the 11 year old me to be a group of really old tramps doing a song intrigued me at the time – in the intervening years the 3 folky Jethro Tull albums have come to be among favourite albums.
*yes that’s the Abba video I remember with the spinning coins
*weren’t the Kursaal Flyers (via pub rock) vaguely connected to punk – I’m sure I’ve read this
*I remember quite liking the Paul Nicholas records at the time but then I was 11 – but still think they’re inoffensive bits of fun – anyway watching him in ‘Just Good Friends’ helped brighten up the mid-80s for me.
* Remember knowing all the words to ‘Under The Moon Of Love’ as a first year and singing them as I floated around school that Christmas.
* long play out of ALL the Billy Ocean record – did they run out of acts to put on or something – they could have had Chris Hill (a new entry) spinning his tune if they were that short
RE Wichita; yes the Stranglers did seem to have Paul Nicholas rivalling amounts of appearances on TOTP in 1977 and they were always being played on Capital so for me they were also besides the shock horror stuff about the Sex Pistols in the news about the only punk that impinged in my consciousness
Andy, did you forget lovely Dana was on? Really? Gosh.
Re Nicholas: “Harmless bits of fun” is fair and balanced, but even at the time, a year above you at school, we were left cold by this nu bubblegum. “I’d love to go, but it’s grandma’s party tonight” was a ‘humorous’ excuse for not doing something.
Glad you’re giving Tommy Hunt some love. I saw him at the Forum three or four years back and he was in great voice, looked slim and dapper, and was most impressive for someone in his mid 70s.
Weeeelll., I’d say maybe Wichita is ‘slightly’ older than me, but maybe it’s actually because this song was out when our Grandma had her eightieth birthday party, and the whole clan got back together for the big party. Apart from cousin georgie who had got completely plastered the night before and didn’t make it until late on the following day. Grandma forgave him anyway. I was just about old enough to understand what my family were like and how, by now. Anyway, she didn’t make 81, so hey.
The Kursal Flyers (along with the Sensational Alex Harvey Band) have been one of the highlights of these repeats for me, the moments that something a bit odd (and something I’m unfamiliar with), broke through the wall-to-wall Summertime Special regulars. Oddly they remind me of no-one so much as My Life Story.
That was ‘thanks’ to the ‘on-purpose’ over-the-top arrangement by Mike Batt for that one song. The rest (as far as I recall) were nothing like it. (I remember a seeminglylong song called “I don’t wanna ride no Speedway” on the “Yeah! The KID!” fronted “45″ pop show just before it died..)
Closer to the Steve Gibbons band, I reckons.
I randomly recorded the Kursaal Flyers’ Speedway off the radio (Annie Nightingale’s show) with my first cassette recorder, Christmas 1975. I totally took it at face value, as a racetrack death disc with a happy ending; as a pastiche (Tell Laura I Love Her?) it’s a lot subtler than Little Does She Know. I also didn’t know who the hell it was by for almost 20 years – Jak Knowles, former Shampoo bassist, found me a copy.
I still like it, but I wish it had a glammier production. The curse of the flat 1975 studio sound!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzMHpo–njc
Ah, random radio tapings! I recorded a Peel show, back god knows when, and the centre piece was a long guitar piece which started like the Allmans “Top Gear” theme, but faded into a rambling drone for 15 mins or so. At the end, JPeel announced the title and artist “Elaine Renault”.
Of course, super-obscure and impossible to find. It took the internet to be invented and a vague memory of it, and eventually I found the artist was called “Alain Renaud”. And then I managed to track down the LP for ooh, £12
Thin Lizzy make good and show it’s not all outdated.
Barry Biggs not as bad as I remember at the time.
Status Quo with a decent sound.
“John Christie due to have a fantastic 1977″ of course he’s never seen again.
Legs/Stevie Dance I wish. Odd costume choice but.
Paul Nicholas gets no dancers this time.
Liverpool Express sound a lot like… no it’s gone.
Fully expected the line “I used to be a dreamer” to get followed by “I was the only one”
Mike Oldfield tries to pretend he’s not there in his film.
And Johnny Mathis, and we’re done.
@482, I’ve just realised, they both recorded albums called Golden Mile. That must have been what I could hear!
Last night’s show…
Thin Lizzy – odd that you don’t hear this anymore, it’s tremendous. Great solo, super-confident vocal, moody too. Don’t think I’ve heard it since it came out. Not the no.1 Noel predicts of course…
Barry Biggs – the one thing this has over the Philly-tastic Blue Magic original is the bonkers Moog break. Presumably no one from the Radiophonic Workshop was around to help out for the TOTP orchestra remake. Pretty lifeless skank.
Status Quo – a Hank Williams song with no chorus. Quo Boogie by numbers. No Mystery Song, or Rain.
John Christie – has he out-smugged Randy Edelman? What a slappable face! He’s SO SURE this is a massive hit that I think the nation willed him back to obscurity. Bullying the audience into an Auld Lang Syne dance doesn’t help. Truly awful.
Legs & Co/Stevie Wonder – great song, but am I missing something with the Chaplin gear? (thinks: have never really listened to the lyric)
Paul Nicholas – still stinky.
Liverpool Express – fast using up their You Are My Love goodwill tokens. Such an obvious and puffed-up rewrite of Imagine that the group name suddenly makes sense – fast food Beatles innit.
Mike Oldfield – sweet. I bought this, a nascent folk-rock thing? Can’t get enough of Tubular Bells at the moment. Had someone harangue me last weekend about the greatness of Hergest Ridge, too. As for this video, the lady with the dark Purdey do kinda makes up for the weak Legs & Co routine.
Arthur Lee – ah, no, it’s Johnny Mathis. This wears thin very quickly.
More on Thursday, I do believe! What do I want for Christmas? I really hope Tina Charles doing Dr Love hasn’t been wiped…
anyone actually know what happened to Face of ’77 John Christie? Google not too helpful except (a) he may have been Australian; (b) he appeared in Dave Clark’s Time musical for a couple of years at the Dominion Theatre in the mid-eighties; (c) he may have had to change his surname for reasons unspecified.
As for Liverpool Express: “Every play must have a scene” – this week’s No Shit Sherlock Award winners.
The Mathis song is quite odd: who IS this child to be born? Can’t be Jesus, Jesus — depicted white, probably brown — most definitely wasn’t yellow. IS IT THE ANTI-CHRIST?
Legs & Co were dressed as Russell Mael, obviously. And Quo were great: they were OUR TELEVISION I tell you.
Hergest Ridge: “I’d rather be… on horseback”
Nope, that was Ommadawn.
My dad’s reaction to Mathis: “Black, white, brown, yellow – no one knows.” “What about RED you racist bastard?”
at school everyone loved and played oldfield all the time — i owned no LPs then and just borrowed tapes, so everything is muddled in my head
Remember interview in NME where MO had done a course in exegesis to puncture his extreme shyness — visible in this clip — and it had apparently turned him into a a MASSIVE BEARD-FREE PR!CK.
#489, it’s “all” children. Any one of which could be the savior of the whole of civilisation. Unless it got AB(the rest of this satirical message has been edited for googly reasons) BY THOSE VIL(and this bit too)STARDS!
John Christie. This single wasn’t “too bad”, but I do remember one of his follow-ups “We had the time of our lives”, as I got to review it on the radio for Thames Valley Broadcasting (or, Radio 210 as it was known then).
It was a horrible ‘razza-snazzamatazza’ attempt, and I did say “I hope I never hear it again”, and oddly enough I never have. (The ‘record of the week’ was the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant”)
aha so it is a sharp pro-POPulation put-down to malthus and paul ehrlich!
Didn’t John Christie write something half-decent for Cliff? Google doesn’t reveal much beyond Time, as Punctum says. I always associated him with John Farrar, an Aussie on EMI with Shads/ONJ connections, but I think I’m plain wrong.
I think the older kids at my school were too cool to wave Oldfield albums about. Or Tull for that matter. Genesis, Man (!) and Hawkwind were big among my peers with older brothers. My year was mainly about punk and Bowie, then later metal or The Jam. In ’77 I kept my Abba Greatest Hits/Arrival, Shadows 20 Golden Greats, and Golden Hour Of The Kinks hidden at home.
Re Mathis: I think the Superbaby angle wins the day. “It’s all a dream and illusion… it must come true, some time soon…” That’s not EVERY baby is it? It’s a SUPERBABY. No one even knows what skin colour it has! A translucent superbaby.
“Every superbaby must be translucent” (L Express).
’76-7, my year at school: boys into Quo, Genesis, Rush, Yes, girls into Abba, David Soul, Supertramp, ELO.
’76-77 the boys were into Purple, ELP, Floyd, Zep, etc. Did I say Yes? no? OK, Yes.
See, what put me off The Clash at first wasn’t their Radical Politics or angry stance, etc, it was that all those that were really “into” ELP, Yes, etc because they were really intelligent and important, now were Clash fans because they were really important and intelligent. The usual ‘set up them barriers boys we can’t all be the chosen ones!’
Not at my school they weren’t; nobody was into the Clash except for Leon Trotsky, guitarist for Raw Deal, Bothwell’s number one punk band.
The proggers at my school didn’t really swap sides. Oh, Zep were big of course, I forgot to mention them.
No girls = no David Soul fans. Shame.
Don’t remember much of a Clash thing at my school at all. Sex Pistols and Stranglers were big, a little later the Banshees and the Jam.
There was a massive set of “drop” and “revision”, followed by “deny” of course.
Some were genuinely ‘open ears’, most were “I never liked Tull, it was him”
small coterie of sabbath/tull fans became pioneers of punk, against (younger!) genesis/yes/ELP/BJH cohort
plus there was a lone (difficult cranky much-disliked) young man who repped for ABBA against all the sneers, so well done him (= it wasn’t me!)
i left this^^^school in 1978 for college, so no idea how allegiances subsequently evolved
More than 500 comments. Best call the late Ross McWhirter. And still a couple of ’76 TOTPs to go!
Tried Ommadawn this morning. I like the folkier instrumentation, but not enough going on melodically for me – until the On Horseback bit of course. Like Tub Bells, one side much better than the other (both appear to be called Ommadawn Part One on spotify – I much prefer the non Horseback side).
Dunno, I like TubBel2, possibly more. Unless that’s the side you meant.
No I didn’t. But reading Marcello’s piece it made sense of how I’ve always felt about it – TubBel1 being a complete piece, Pt 2 filling out an album.
Still, some lovely parts on Side 2, esp the opening melody which is avant-library and so primed me for music I wouldn’t discover until the 90s. Caveman I used to like when I was 11. I’m not 11 now. Sailors Hornpipe was too daft even when I was 11.
Caveman on the “remake” is even more awfuller.
re 483/484 – at least you tracked your random tape fragments down. For a couple of weeks until it chewed itself up I had a bit of tune from Pete Wardman’s Kiss FM weekday afternoon hardbag mix which even after about 17 years and the fact that it cut out/was mixed out after a couple of minutes (it was from about 1994)I still look on as my musical Holy Grail.
So does anyone has any clues as to the identity of a hardbag/possibly early hardhouse/harder mix of a housier track from about 1994 which samples the strings from Perry Como’s ‘It’s Impossible’….?
I was unfortunate enough to live in an area which still had the 11+ so I would imagine that all those who were into the progressive rock and then punk went to grammar school as in my two (I moved 10 miles across town at the end of the first year) secondary moderns I don’t remember anyone being into those types of music.
To be honest in the first year I don’t remember anyone particularly taking much of an interest in music (weird really as when were much younger we’d all loved watching Slade, Sweet, Gary Glitter etc on TOTP but I suppose the visual outrageousness appealed to 7 or 8 year old boys). I was into Abba in the first year though – I had their greatest hits for my 12th birthday my first ever new record.
Some of the older (fifth years?)were Teds and into rock ‘n’ roll which by the advent of ‘Grease’ had taking over the whole school – a lot of the hard older lads turning up on non-uniform day in full Ted outfits.
And I do remember some of the bad boys in our first or second year classes bursting into renditions of Showaddywaddy or Darts songs into weaker teachers’ classes.
Then around 1980 everyone had their hair shaved off and got into TwoTone and especially Madness (the only vaguely punk band that were ever followed were The Jam but that was from a Mod Revival angle and still quite a minority thing).
Also round about 1980 some of the girls (obviously through older working boyfriends who went to clubs) started talking about jazz-funk and you’d see Light Of The World and Slough Alldayer etc graffiti written on exam desks. This mysterious new world started to fascinate me as you’d never hear about it in the media.
By the time we left in 1981 jazz-funk had complete taken over our school year and the town.
I did wonder what I was watching there for a while – not Christmas and certainly not 1976 – but normal service has now ben resumed. The third show in what, five days? Mr Ambassador, you are spoiling us! The Xmas Day TOTP was the biz, wasn’t it? All the number ones of the year on one show, with tinsel and glitter and fake snow! And anything’s got to be an improvement on the seasonal TOTP2, with its tired old reruns of Slade, Wizzard, Lewie and all other usual suspects.
Having said that it was possible to feel a twinge of sympathy for the early-year hitmakers who by Christmas had been firmly consigned to One Hit Wonderland (Slik being somewhat along those lines, although I did like “Requiem”). I would say “Babylon Zoo” but that would get a nose a-twitching.
Didn’t know what to make of that one (wonder if the wiped 16/12 edition was any better?) – always liked the Barry Biggs’s ‘Sideshow’, that John Christie ‘Auld Lang Syne’ track made me cringe big time, and I noticed the black geezer out of Ruby Flipper dancing in silhouette behind Legs And Co and that’s about it.
Now if they could have got Steely Dan on there…
Argh! Missed tonight’s Xmas Special. Just saw a glimpse of Tina Charles in a stripy jumper and the Bo Rhap vid.
#512! On again at 3am.
Good luck.
Witchita, It’s on again on Christmas Day – the perfect day to watch it
Also, I see a cameraman has found a performance of Bowie doing Jean Genie on TOTP which the BBC are airing this Weds
Don’t forget iPlayer, wichita.
475 – “Mucky Sue” I have so named because of her generally expressionless face, unlike the others who smile sweetly just like the girls-next-door they are supposed to me. Sue was never like that. She was, though, a particularly wonderful dancer and displayed legs which went on forever.
I trust that clears up this vital point.
Unless I missed them, I don’t think the Brotherhood of Man featured last night, which was a surprise – whatever you think of it, it was certainly one of the year’s biggest hits (maybe even the top seller?) yet it was passed over for the likes of “Devil Woman.” Odd.
It’s a ‘two-parter’, they’re on ‘tomorrow’
@ Jimmy, 516. Thanks!
I imagine the Swede missed the Xmas special part one as I can’t believe he hasn’t passed comment on the outfits and ‘arty’ camera angles that went with legs and co’s dancing queen routine.
Last night – mostly seen it done it. The Killing of Georgie at last, though it’s not quite as good as I remember. I can’t think of the last time I heard this on the radio. Lyrics to ‘part 2′ don’t make much sense, either – he’s dead, Rod!
Thanks for the iplayer tips, gang!
I didn’t bother with part two, no real surprises to be had.
I’m sure that was the same as back in the day, always seemed like it was going to be interesting, but they always seemed to concentrate on the biggest but dullest stuff.
# 520 – Wichita is right, I’m afraid. The SKY digi-box chez Swede decided to go the same way as Jim Phelps’ wee tape machines so my Mucky Sue fix I was denied. It’s okay now, thank the Lord. And speaking of whom, compliments of the season to everyone at The Trigger, officers and enlisted!
Before we wrap up this thread and concentrate our TOTP comments on “Popular ‘77”, it seems only right (since it was originally posted on New Year’s Eve) to link from here to an interview with Sue Menhenick on the Pan’s People website, where she talks about being in the three resident dance troupes, the objections to Floid (“totally unfair and outrageous even then”), the proto-Runaways look for the 1974 Pan’s People single (working with Mike Batt and Chris Spedding), how she likes Depeche Mode (not the early years) and how polite and charming Lemmy and the Stranglers were.
http://panspeople.com/?q=sue
Plus on the excellent “Yes It’s Number One” site, Wichita of this parish reviews 1976:
http://yesitsnumberone.blogspot.com/
Thanks to my Rt Hon Friend, Erithian. The Sue interview is fabulous and underpins just what a total class act she is and always was. She would certainly be a wonderful choice for a judge on “Strictly”, which is something the Swede stays a mile away from but wouldn’t if Sue suddenly appeared on it. The only thing is that she’s far too nice to say anything bad about anyone, even if Erithian and myself were to come gliding across the floor together, a sight certainly too horrific for family viewing. I can also echo one of the comments in saying how lovely it would have been encountering Sue and the other Pans, Flips or Legs dining out and all the merriment this involved. I’m not sure Mrs Swede would have been similarly enchanted, though, and when I sent a couple of bottles of bubbly over with my compliments, my goose would have been cooked, I think.
Hats off too to Wichita for his piece. God, you’re a talented bunch on this website. Forward ho to 1977, folks!!