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 • featured content/Pop/popular year poll • 9,617 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, 476–500, 501–525, 526–551.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, 476–500, 501–525, 526–551.
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.
If you enjoy Popular please link to it or tell your friends about it. The more people we have commenting and sharing their views on these songs, the better.
Index of reviews and scores so far
Popular FAQ
Popular Facebook Page
Popular Lucky Dip (a random post)
Not a good one – 3 bloody flops must be some kind of a record.
Re the titles summed it up – they spelled Tavares wrong (they put Taveres)and you’d think by now they could have found a picture of the Shangri-las.
I should imagine a lot of people on here have already seen them but the few TOTPs on youtube from 1969-72 show a completely different programme – the 1969/71 shows especially. Really happening and hip with what seem like trendy London scenesters making up the audience and dancing like clubbers do in swingin’ 60s films. Everything from the graphics and opening titles to the chart rundown is cool and the djs aren’t even embarrassing. And probably most important the vast majority of the performances are mimed and the excitement of the actual records pervades the whole shows rather than being dissipated by that terrible TOTP orchestra.
Something happened around 1973/74 when the horrors of “Light Entertainment” seemed to commandeer the show and it became the squarest thing on earth. It doesn’t mean I don’t still like watching these 1976 repeats though.
Once again I can only bemoan the tragedy of the wiped first 11 years of TOTP (typical sod’s law they started keeping in just as it started to go downhill).
re 274: final song was the Chanter Sisters’ ‘Sideshow’ (reached no 43) – not the Barry Biggs/Blue Magic hit of later the same year.Quite a respectable bit of UK soul.
Jimmy James was another sound of the hot summer of 1976 – I always associate it with hearing it blaring from transistor radios on Weymouth beach that summer.Only one reference to the heatwave this week but the mid-end of July were absolutely steaming as I remember going on a school trip to Hampton Court on the last day of term (July 21st so day before next week’s repeat?)and it was like being in a tropical/desert country.
“Sideshow” – previously or possibly subsequently also a non-charting solo single by Allan Clarke of the Hollies.
The bits they missed out were a second helping of Ruby Flipper (“Taveres”) and predictably 100 Ton & A Feather.
Also: “Maureen McGovan.” I never knew she was Glaswegian!
I do remember “Drag race driver”, another Radio Luxembourg turntable hit. Not bad, but could have been a more interesting song with a ‘lola’ style slant, but then again it’s only 1976.
“Mystery Song” is fine, wonder if they play it nowadays? More likely to do a version of “combine harvester” thesedays…
Chart rundown! Shangri-las still have no photo, I remember one specialist music magazine in 1976 or so having a letter asking about them, and the reply was that no-one knew who they were.
Steve Harley and his new Cockney Rebel do “Here comes the sun” like it was an easy thing to do: Cover a beatles song, have a hit. Which it was.
“Jeans on”, apparently the second thing DLT does first thing in the morning. Anyone like to guess what the first thing was? Anyway, David Dundas has three dancers in front of his stage, dancing badly with hand-made t-shirts with “Hot Gossip” emblazoned on them. Now, that’s a bit cheeky..
“Misty Blue” – Dorothy Moore. I remember how often the BBC would end up with imported performance films of low quality, of course there wouldn’t be a hit nowadays without the video and so on..
Sheer Elegance “Temptation”, and the first flop of the night. Blimey, you can see how small the audiences were here. And blimey also, this song is terrible. The phrase “over sixteen” is brandished, but the singer doesn’t seem THAT bothered really.
Alex Harvey does his tea party again. I think this is a repeat of the first performance.
Rub Flip dance to Harvest for the world, it’s passable. Oh, they have just got DLT and some audience members to join them onstage. A bit like how Public Image would do on American Bandstand.
“In Zaire” – Johnny Wakeling becomes the go-to man for Muhammad Ali tribute songs with his second. This one does get a bit closer to some sort of menace and muscle, as opposed to his previous which was quite polite..
“Dr Kiss Kiss” – For once DLT gets it spot on with his “strike him off the medical register” comment. Her miming is terrible without actually being off. Like she’s never actually sang this. Was this singer actually the one on the record? It’s complicated with the 5000 volts..
Johnny Cash – that’s not a ukelele mate. Still, possibly the best new performance here.
Oh Suzannah by 1776. Don’t remember this at all. A sort of gospel version of the old ‘classic’. It’s not terrible, it’s not good. Is that Kenney Jones of “Yellow Dog”/”Fox” on drums?
Elton and Kiki number one. It’s funny, back then videos could cost the price of a camera and man, in the studio the were using anyway. What’s the average cost nowadays? There’ll be none of that ‘independant’ music produced on shoestring budgets anymore…
So, it all wraps up with KC and the Sunshine band over the credits and shots of the studio lights…
I don’t think I missed out any there, that’s the 40 min version that you don’t/won’t get on iplayer…
Seriously? So I’ll never see Sheer Elegance? Or Alex Harvey’s ugly mug for the zillionth time? Would happily have seen Misty Blue again.
DLT appeared to be railing against getting a parking ticket in Amersham at one point, as well as alluding to wanking. What a horrible man.
No memory of 1776, which I thought was dreadful.
As is One Piece At A Time, or Boy Named Sue without the “swearing”; worthy of Ray Stevens.
Who the heck was Johnny Wakelin? He can barely sing. I remember In Zaire getting played out (was it a cover?) circa 1990. But I don’t remember his later single, Dr. Frankenstein’s Disco Party. It sounds just super.
Lord Dundas – love this. My summer hit of ’76, memories of family singalongs in our orange VW beetle, and a holiday in a caravan in Dawlish Warren. Backing ticks like clockwork, double-tracked weedy vocal somehow adds to it.
Steve “Nice” and Cockney Rebel’s last proper hit had a nice psych-y coda which I don’t remember. It’s alright.
Four times! Who’d have thought that “Boston Tea Party” would have been in the running for best single of 2011?
RE@280 Sounds like 1776 were TOTP’s blatant attempt to celebrate the American Bicentennial. Similar to the embarrassing bloke they had on doing the same for the Silver Jubilee a year later. Needless to say both didn’t get even so much as a sniff at the actual charts they even flogged the 1977 record to death on the radio.
That can’t have been a very knowledgeable music magazine seeing as the Shangri-las had had reasonably sized hits in the UK in the mid-60s and then ‘Leader of the Pack’ had been a big hit after being re-issued in 1972. An early TOTP memory of mine was the cartoon they showed on TOTP in late 1972 – it featured the Leader on a chopper motorbike which then sprouted wings and flew across the sky after he gets himself killed.
IIRC it was a hit in 1976 because they used a ‘re-recorded with different words version’ of it in a Levi’s advert at the time. I don’t know why it was a hit in 1972 though.
The “embarrassing bloke” doing the “Jubilee” song was Neil Innes, and he is rather embarrassed about the song.
And of course, “Leader of the Pack” wouldn’t be the last 1976 single to start with the words “Is she really going out with him?”
Yep, I can cite “New Rose” The Damned, and “Kill” the Albertos. Both on stiff records, uncoincidentally.
I was in Matthew Street, Liverpool last weekend, and saw the ‘wall of fame’ for the ‘names’ that played the Cavern, past and present. (e.g. Geordie, Queen, Beatles (obv), Adele, etc.)
I saw that there was a metal plaque stating that two acts had had their bricks removed: Gary Glitter and Jonathan King.
So were the Damned, Joe Jackson, et al. all very literately referring to Brill building/girl groups like the Shangri-las with their ‘Is she really going out with..’ songs? (I’m supposing that the answer must be ‘yes’ and am now feeling a little thick for never having noticed this. E.g.,I’ve tended to think of Blondie and Chrissie Hynde as carrying that girl-group gene into post-punk and as being outliers from punk itself in part for that reason, but now it’s starting to seem as though maybe the energy of the most gang-like girl-group records was central to punk itself).
I think the current hit status of Leader Of The Pack was a spin-off of Charly Records re-issuing Red Bird material in 1976*, maybe for the first time since the records first came out (frighteningly, just 10-12 years earlier). I imagine a few significant people bought these comps and got inspired.
Girl Groups were part of the Bomp aesthetic which bled into Punk.
Or it could just be that the Damned were ‘recycling’ the New York Dolls Shangri La’s quote (“when I say I’m in love you best believe I’m in love L-U-V”).
Re 288: the previous week’s TOTP is now complete on iplayer (35+ mins, at any rate) except for 100 Ton And A Feather. So will they cut the Ramones’ Baby I Love You on the grounds it was produced by a convicted killer? Let’s wait and see. Anyone willing to take a bet?
*I’m happy to be corrected on this. The ones with the shiny red eggs on the cover, typically odd/unrepresentative artwork, looks very ’76 but I don’t have them so can’t check.
re 289 How could LOTP be reissued for the first time since the 1960s in 1976 when it got to number 3 in 1972?
Re this re-issue the Levi’s advert must have been a few months later as I’m pretty sure it was being shown in my first year at secondary school around the time ‘Happy Days’ started in this country
PS There’s probably not some great musical/stylistic reason why ‘Is she really going out with him?’ was used by the Damned – it just as likely because LOTP had just been in the charts and he thought it was a silly thing to say at the beginning of the record.
I have a super-cheapie* Shangri-Las best-of from (I believe) the early 70s, with a quote from Pete Townshend on the back (saying that “Past, Present, Future” is the greatest pop-song ever written). At work so can’t check the label, but I don’t feel that they had ever really fallen out of rock consciousness; certainly they were “in” the canon, as was Shadow Morton.
*i.e. sleeve aesthetic = K-Tel cash-in, though I think it’s actually a major.
AndyPandy @ 290
And here’s me thinking that Marcello’s quip was a Joe Jackson reference.
Speaking of which, I don’t recall Nick Lowe going on TOTP to do “So It Goes” (which came out in August ’76) so no doubt the no-hit section will be filled with yet more Light Entertainment waiting room hopefuls.
I have a memory of the 1976 Charly re-release of “Leader” having a bit cut out of it… this was mentioned disapprovingly in the music press at the time… seems ridiculous, but can anyone remember anything about it? I also remember the TV ad, which ended “Leader of the pack – IN HIS LEVI’S! Leader of the pack – IN HIS LEVI’S!”
(Or was it Wranglers? So many ICONIC jeans ads in 1976, heh – cf. David Dundas and Brutus.)
There was also the contemporaneous Contempo reissue which was uncut and I think the chart position represented combined sales of the two. Clearly copyright issues at work.
Well, after listening around over the last few hours and reading up some, I am seriously digging the Shangri-Las. They’ve got *tons* of good-to-great songs, and just look at them in early 1965. Very cool.
A bit of digging around suggests that one of the versions was a re-recording. The two were listed separately in their first week (outside the top 40) then combined thereafter. Shortly afterwards, the three surviving Shangri-La’s reformed, then recorded some unreleased material for Sire before playing CBGBs, with Lenny Kaye on guitar! The label tried to push them towards disco, but the band wanted to sound like Patti Smith, so it all came to naught.
Mike at 284: that’s the one “Leader of the pack in his Levis” – definitely Levis!
A couple of years later Gary Numan even did a jeans advert “Don’t Be A Dummy” – not sure for what brand though.
Think it might have even be recorded before ‘Are Friends Electric’ was big.I remember it being shown at the same time.
“Don’t Be A Dummy” was for Lee Cooper, and it was all over the telly while “Are Friends Electric” was at Number One. A version charted and made TOTP, re-recorded by an ex-member of Atomic Rooster called John DuCann. As he looked like a scary relic from 1971 rather than an alien cyborg from the 21st century, the single’s progress was duly stopped in its tracks.