This has the slightly dubious distinction of being the first record I ever disliked. I barely knew about records at all, I was four and three quarters: so my cynicism started early, if you like. This one was inescapable - number one for nine weeks, two million sold, flattening the opposition through Christmas ‘77 and then on into ‘78. I didn’t know what number ones were but I guess I just got bored of “Mull” being around, its comforting lullaby sway pushing into even our pop-free household*. I remember not being able to figure out what a Mull was, or a Kintyre: I’d been reading the Hobbit, and the Narnia books, so I reckoned it was an honorific, like King, or Tarkaan. And this dark haired guy singing it, he’d be the Mull, then?

Actually he was royalty of a sort, though more bicycle monarchy than Sun King by this point: still doggedly insistent on Wings the band, not McCartney the brand. Wings were intermittently terrific, more often whimsically entertaining or a curate’s egg, rarely as dreary as this. “Mull Of Kintyre” doesn’t much sound like a Wings record, in fact - it was recorded during sessions for London Town, their most resolutely lightweight album, and would have stuck out there like an unaloft thumb. Macca has told and retold the story of how he assumed the dreamcaught melody for “Yesterday” was an unconscious borrow from a far more primal tune - but how much more timeless does the hymnal “Mull” sound? It obviously struck chords deep enough to smash the Beatles’, and anyone else’s, sales records: an unexpected climax to the year punk broke.

What do I think of it now? Like most of the really monolithic singles, it’s hard to listen to fresh. It’s certainly a sweet and sincere record, and the pipes - locally sourced - work well. But there’s no ache to it, no true sense of place, it evokes nothing but standard Highlands postcard imagery. The mood is soporific: only right at the end, when the Laird of Wings breaks into a “woooooo-ha!”, does anyone try and even hint that life in the Mull might ever be other than the gentle contemplation of simple beauties. Which, of course, was the appeal: in a guttering economy, a fractious country, a pop chart full of confusion, Wings delivered a record about opting out entirely, a hit of pure escapism. “Mull Of Kintyre” is a one-way ticket out of pop culture: though those left behind by its Tartan Rapture were about to enjoy years of astonishing musical plenty.

*oh yeah, “Girls School” - apparently this was treated as the A-Side in the US, but here ”Mull” was a double-A-side in name only: I don’t think I’d ever heard “Girls School” until a year or so ago, and I’ve heard plenty of Wings. “Girls School” is much more typical of the band, though - the kind of McCartney song that kindly reviewers have always called “a rocker”, which is to say it is to rock as a jog round the park is to the Olympic 1000m. Since I have no especial concern with the rockingness of things, I quite like it. But it has no business influencing this score.

A young - or maybe not so young - woman, settled in her own mind to unhappy but unruffled spinsterhood, finds her hopes unexpectedly awakened. Can she trust her instincts? Can she even read them? Can this really be happening? “The Name Of The Game”’s scenario is romance-novel standard, and its emotional territory is ABBA heartland, the twilit world as a relationship shifts between ‘on’ and ‘off’. ABBA regularly find unease where most pop strides boldly forward: “Name”, in its ambition as well as its mood, anticipates “The Day Before You Came” (which could be its narrative prequel).

“The Name Of The Game”, first single off a new album, is a self-conscious step forward in craft, clustered with ideas and contrasts and hooks - I remember an Elvis Costello interview in which he singled it out as the moment he realised that, yes, ABBA were Proper Songwriters. Anyone who hadn’t spotted that by now was being a bit chumpy, in my view, and I’m also not totally sure “Name” succeeds - sometimes I love it, but on balance it’s my least favourite of their Number 1s.

The guiding principle behind the track isn’t difficult to figure out - diffident synth sweeps and clammy bassline dramatise the doubt in the verses, fanfares and harmonies on the chorus bring the hope to life. All the individual parts are terrific, and Frida and Agnetha interpret the song magnificently - but for once, I think, ABBA’s arrangements let them down. The brass feels squeezed in and almost sounds canned; the omnipresent bassline is too upfront, lumbering where it should be nagging. Lyrically, too, this is a mixed bag: the “and I am never invited” bit is striking in its candour, but the bad poetry of the “bashful child” line is an unusual mis-step. An awkward record about awkward feelings: one of ABBA’s transitional singles, where they’re staking out territories they’d explore better later on.

“Already told you in the first werse…”: I’m not sure whether “Yes Sir” is deceptively dumb or deceptively clever. On the one hand you can see why Goldfrapp, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and a generation of raised-eyebrow indie fans have been drawn to it. The arch and chilly fourth-wall breaking which inverts the song, recasting it as the hustle it always was, is smart stuff. On the other hand it’s not just pretending to be a low-rent “Love To Love You Baby”. I put it on a disco mix I made for my wife once, and she loathed it: all the “yes sir”, “no sir” business came across to her as creepily subservient. Which it is, deliberately, but the “Sir” in the song isn’t coming off too well either, the singer’s testy impatience effectively puncturing his illusions: no talking, no walking, do we have a deal or not…Sir?

The question goes unresolved: the track spirals out with mock-orgasmic coos, carried over from the intro, this time rather less pleasant. ”Yes Sir” wouldn’t remotely be effective without its imperious strings, iconic chorus and chuckling bassline, and its those things that mean I’m writing about it now. But they’re vehicles for a calculating heartlessness that makes this record really stand out.

I can’t help but wish this had been Elvis’ last single, though David Soul does a more than satisfactory job by himself. Where “Don’t Give Up On Us Baby” was a singer playing a role refracted through a TV character, “Silver Lady” drops the hearthrob palaver and sounds more like Soul’s just having a good time, singing the pop he wants to sing while his star’s bright enough to allow it. In that sense it’s closer to a lot of modern sleb-goes-pop material - chuck a saleable song the celebrity’s way, let them have a bash at it.

Muscular and hook-packed, “Silver Lady” is also (I think!) the final chart-topping fling for Tony Macaulay and Geoff Stephens, two titans of the British bubblegum era, the backroom boys behind many a track that’s glided serenely to a five or six out of ten on this blog - this no exception. So it’s fun to hear “Silver Lady” as a last hurrah for the bubblegum old school, its arrangement marvellously wasteful, string figures and pianos and moody street bass all used up and worn out. It certainly sounds like ”cop show” was at the back of the writers’ minds when they crafted the lyrics - hard-bitten loner walking rain-washed streets in search of mysterioso broad - but there are moments when Soul’s gusto and the writers’ carpentry transcends the corn and almost hits Jimmy Webb levels of offhand evocation, and for pop craftsmen that’s high praise.

Elvis’ first posthumous Number One is like a miniature of his career: a brilliant beginning, a saggy middle, and it ends way too soon. Elvis comes out fighting, swaying and swaggering over a roiling disco boogie - when the brass stabs in on ”all of my resistance” it’s a genuine thrill. His voice is still iconic: its slurs and mumbles an economical, broadstroke sketch of Presley past, but born of expertise as much as laziness. ”Way Down” is let down by its chorus, whose jauntiness sweeps all tension away and whose ending dispels any momentum: the song’s components just never really fit together.

And then he’s left the building. With the rock’n'roll revival such a force in mainstream seventies pop it’s fitting Elvis got his own last word in - and “Way Down” is considerably better than the Showaddywaddy or Stardust efforts we’ve been through, even if it’s a minor entry in the King’s own record book. At the time of his death, by all accounts Elvis was a marginal figure - with the right medical care, maybe he’d have had a comeback or two in him. Maybe not.

A strange thing about Elvis Presley is that his figure in decline has become an archetype as strong as his younger self. It can be hard to feel his direct impression on pop, harder the further away we get from the event zero of his emergence, but if he no longer defines pop he still encompasses it. Few began so blazingly, sold out so totally, returned so fiercely, collapsed so gracelessly: Presley anticipates every pop story.

The format of “Float On” - each Floater steps forward, makes his pitch, retires beckoning - doesn’t just anticipate Blind Date, it’s also a basic formula for early group hip-hop: every member trying to outdo the last. For my money, the winning Floater here is surely Larry, largely for his magnificently self-confident use of the third-person. But your floatage may vary, and really there’s only one way to sort this one out:

I’ll leave the comments box to speculate on the real motivations behind each of these preferences.

“Float On” stands up to more listens than you’d imagine, though still not enough to get it beyond ‘kind of charming’. The audacious novelty concept wears out, as novelties do, but the good-natured, bubbling music does exactly what it says on the title. How true a portrayal of seductive Seventies Man this was I have no idea, but “Float On” is amazingly evocative of a perceived era, one built up in the childish imagination by old menswear adverts and past-your-bedtime TV shows, half-understood. Amiably preposterous.

Without theft, there is no pop, but it’s still rather squirmsome to hear the more lumbering attempts. Brotherhood of Man’s - let’s be generous - tribute to ABBA fails partly because it doesn’t stick closely ENOUGH to its source material. ABBA records gain what emotional power they have from the force of the melody and performance letting you fill in what the lyrics miss out. So “Fernando”, a record the Brotherhood might possibly have heard when working on “Angelo”, works because the melody creates the regret the lyrics deny, and because the background to this strained campfire conversation is hinted at but never crystallised. “Angelo”, on the other hand, has no truck with such subtleties, preferring to spell out the tragic fate of shepherd boy Angelo at the same time as hammering it home with the music.

To be fair to the Brotherhood, it’s not like most death ballads don’t take this Donald-ate-the-pie* approach to storytelling. A death song pastiche of ”Fernando” should more properly be something along the lines of “Ode To Billie Joe” or the Shangri-La’s “Past, Present And Future”, where it’s obvious that something apalling and unspoken is happening in the background but it’s fearfully unclear what. Both those songs are, not by coincidence, amazing. “Angelo” is not. At no point during the progress of the record do I care about Angelo, or his chick, and I don’t get any sense of place or personality or stake or anything at all, in fact the only thing in the lyric to remark on is that awkward slip into Yodaspeak in one of the verses: “Rich was she”, a clumsy shoehorn which seems to sum up the whole record.

For all that, I wouldn’t call “Angelo” actually bad. Its slipshod laziness is still a hundred times preferable to “Save All Your Kisses For Me”, and at least you get to cheer as Angelo pops his clogs. Also, by luck or study, the Brotherhood have hit on a belter of a chorus, with the “They took their LIVES that NIGHT” section as rousing an imitation of ABBA as you’ll find in the late 70s: at that moment “Angelo” seizes some kind of momentum, which it quickly squanders, but there’s still enough hook behind the clumsiness to stop me really disliking this.

*A brief explanation of Donald-ate-the-pie: this useful critical concept was introduced to me by the Dirty Vicar, and comes from a Mickey Mouse cartoon strip. Panel one shows a pie, baked by Mickey. Panel two shows Mickey’s distress as he discovers his pie has vanished. Panel three shows Donald Duck, with his long neck distorted by the unmistakable shape of a pie. Panel four shows Mickey saying “IT WAS DONALD. HE ATE THE PIE.” So it springs to mind whenever I come across exposition that is not only ungainly but actively undermines previously achieved neatness. It actually isn’t at all applicable to “Angelo”, then, which never goes anywhere near neatness, but the concept is more fun than the song really.

One of the remarkable things about “I Feel Love” is that it still sounds futuristic now. Not because the effects and techniques it uses remain way ahead of what pop’s capable of, but because it helped fix the idea of what “the future” would sound like: its specific mix of voice and electronics evoking gleaming hedonism, endless clockwork pleasure. “I Feel Love”, like robots and spaceships on sci-fi magazine covers, represents a fixed future we can’t ever quite get past.

But at the same time “I Feel Love” is a thing very much of 1977 - its sounds and beats somehow antique, with the way its internal rhythms often seem to shift out of phase giving the track its mechanical feel. It’s the pop equivalent of Voyager (which launched within weeks of “I Feel Love”’s release) - the furthest out we’ve ever gone, but powered by primitive late-70s kit.

Back on Earth “I Feel Love” has been refitted and retooled countless times - if not a remix then another track borrowing its pulsing bassline chassis. That’s testament to its success as a pop song as well as a machine age wonder: for all that Moroder’s innovative arrangement suits the tune’s spacey bliss and transforms Summer’s coo into something entranced, “I Feel Love” is still catchy enough to have worked as a much more trad disco or glam-pop record.

The arrangement is what shifts it from good to legendary, though, from the first interlock of bassline and synthesised pulsebeat. It’s Ptolemaic pop, the play of cycles and epicycles: Moroder setting up minutely intersecting circling rhythms and watching as they interact in a music of the spheres that hasn’t stopped turning yet.

Errol Brown brought angst to the dancefloor as regularly as Michael Jackson ever would, but Hot Chocolate’s neuroses were way more effortful, dredged up from some inner coil of dissatisfaction. The rising riff on “So You Win Again” sounds - in the best possible way - leaden, an anchor chain around Brown’s hopes, forever pulling him down. “Here I am again - A LOSER.” It’s not the best Hot Chocolate track - that might be the dystopic “Mindless Boogie”, or the uncomfortably pitiful “It Started With A Kiss”, or “Everyone’s A Winner”, this track’s savage flipside - but what it shares with the band’s best work is the sense of a man wearing a shabby overcoat of disappointment, doomed to misery.

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A key player in Popular to come steps lightly onto the scene: Michael Jackson (with brothers) was already a star but his ball-of-energy performances on the Jackson Five’s hits had always just missed out on the UK #1. On “Show You The Way To Go” he’s a subtler presence, cajoling rather than exploding. His presence - still charismatic, still show-stealing - is a ripple of excitement in “Show You”’s smooth groove. Or maybe that’s just hindsight?

Disco was good to Michael Jackson: it came along at just the right time for the child star to cut the glorious forcefulness and find a voice and style that could carry him along. Jackson realised that the unwavering beat of disco left room for doubt and hurt even while the dancing went on, and on “Show You The Way To Go” you can hear him developing that trademark agonised quaver, that pleading squeak which would take him higher than anyone. The other Jacksons are hardly lacking in suppleness, mind, and this would be a pleasure even if it didn’t point futurewards so tantalisingly.

For a long time all I knew of “Lucille” was the mournful swing of its chorus, and it struck me as quintessential country - catchy, corny, sentimental. Listened to in full, though, it’s a stranger creature, an uncomfortably unresolved study in being a minor character, the intruder in someone else’s drama. Rogers is a barfly with his sights on a pick-up who ends up hearing both Lucille’s side of her story and a snatch of her ex’s, and is left confused and (literally and metaphorically!) impotent.

Who’s the listener meant to sympathise with? Is Lucille untrustworthy? Is her husband’s collapse emotional blackmail? I get the feeling Rogers is probably not on Lucille’s side, but the songwriting is skilled enough to leave it open, and the impression that lingers is of Rogers’ own character, his detachment shaken by fear and doubt.

Unfortunately Rogers’ smooth-as-polished-wood delivery can bring out whatever pathos lives in the song, but none of its doubt or darkness, so I have to concentrate pretty hard not to let “Lucille” just wash over me. It’s a more interesting song than it seems, but not a better one.

Did it get to number one? I don’t know. Would it have made any difference either way? It might have accelerated the opprobrium, naturally there would have been questions in the house, a headline or twenty… but in this case a close call was enough. Malcolm McLaren was in a win-win situation, of course: “God Save The Queen” is easily as powerful as a martyr single as it would have been as a chart-topper. Witness the NME’s recent, risible attempt to get it to its “rightful” position – it landed at #42. All crimes are paid, indeed. The Pistols’ failure to hit the top is much more a badge of pride – “they” (whoever “they” were) were worried! – than an injustice to be righted.

A Pistols Number One might have taken us in two directions – both of which happened anyway. It would have underpinned the triumphalism that’s become a characteristic of the long aftermath of punk: an eruption that’s become a touchstone, a definition of the terms in which radical change can and should happen in pop. Those terms, of course, can never be met – the fond endorsement when something tries is as stifling as the harrumphing when something fails.

The establishment and industry responses to punk may have been the same initially: appalled recoil (shared by a vast number of non-punker kids, in fact). But they soon diverged – the music biz didn’t think “this mustn’t happen again”, quite the opposite: “this must and will happen again, and this time we’ll be there”. Similarly the critical and tastemaker response: punk made heroes of its vanguard, gifting some of them long careers. “I will see it coming next time” became a new hero story. And as the post-punk settlement rolled into place, so too came a reinforcement at all levels of the business of the eternal truth about music, whose temporary overthrow was the mid-60s’ great achievement: it’s the crap stuff that sells. Or, in the words of Malcolm, “Of course the real fans aren’t buying it.”

The other direction is more positive: a Pistols number one would also have reinforced the link between punk and pop – a shock and a challenge, yes, but at the same time a novelty, something else to be assimilated into the great gleeful tapestry of pop music. By covering “God Save The Queen” I’m paying lip service to punk’s sense of exceptionalism, but I’m also trying to deny it: this is pop, like anything else. The apparent rejection of punk by the charts was a smokescreen – the renewed attention to the 7” single would reinvigorate the Top 40. And of course it wasn’t just punk – almost all the most interesting music for the next 20 years happens on single, across a bunch of genres just now poking their heads above commercial water, creeping up on us while we fuss about fixes and safety pins and spit. I occasionally think of Popular as a three-act story: this is the end of Act I, the false start of the second great age of singles, which was also the world that shaped me as a listener.

And at the end of all that, is it a great single itself? Oh yes. Someone – Mark or Mike – perceptively noted in the comments box how “punk” was a wild many limbed-thing, internally riven and never any kind of agreed movement: they identified two pertinent wings, the “back to basics”, pop-rejecting end of it and the more millennial, year zero end. “God Save The Queen”’s power is in how well it appeals to both – the rowdy monarch-baiting working as a broad-based “fuck you” to the nobs, before the amazing shift to the more visionary “flowers in your dustbin” material that so excited people like Greil Marcus (and me).

Straddling these is Johnny Rotten, gleeful and vicious. He’s one of those performers whose physicality and voice are completely inseparable – you simply can’t hear the cackles and digs on “Queen” without seeing his bug-eyed goading stare. His performance makes the song explode: his iconic contempt on “we mean it, maaan”, his straight-backed ranting on “there cannot be sin”, and the way half his lines – “we’re the future, your future” – are as much tease and come-on as attack. The other Pistols? The guitarist is fine when not dicking around with glam divebombs, the drummer is doing a good job nudging Johnny from point to point, if there’s a bassist here I’ve never paid him attention. More than the band’s other singles, this is Rotten’s show.

As the record finally detonates, there is a world of difference between “There is no future in England’s dreaming” – so wake up then! – and “There is no future, an’ England’s dreaming” – bye bye. The two hearings are two summaries of punk’s impact. I’ve never checked which Johnny Rotten actually sings: I’m not sure which I want to be real.

Rod at bay: both cuts of this double-A side find Stewart on the defensive, licking wounds inflicted in failed relationships. The subdued, pretty, “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” is much the more effective (even if its clumsy heart-heart rhyme grates), rambling effectively and reminding you that the lothario is at his most dangerous when cornered. It hardly sounds like a No.1, and would work better without the guitar solo or that odd tacked-on key change, but it’s grown on me and I could take another helping or three of that gentle acoustic picking.

“First Cut Is The Deepest” doesn’t work nearly so well. It relies on you buying Rod as a bruised ingénue on the rebound, which is tough going on impossible. The problem with Rod is always one of credibility – right from the start of his career he wrote himself into his songs so indelibly that I’m always prodding his tracks for believability in a way I’d never do for most of his peers. “First Cut” sounds weatherbeaten and cynical, rather than freshly hurt, and it doesn’t help that it’s such a middleweight plod of a song.

This is one of the last songs I didn’t know at all before starting the project: unlike the very last (and surprisingly late) one, it’s a little gem. There’s a YouTube clip with Tony Blackburn introducing Williams on Top Of The Pops, and bless him, he looks genuinely and thoroughly delighted that for once the Great British P have taken the classy option. As well he might: “Free” is not the kind of record we’ll often encounter - a langourous, confidently smoochy, cocktail-ready soul ballad. Atmospheric without being naff, high on technique without labouring any points, grown-up without being sleazy, and a terrifically teasing performance from Williams, slipping easily between contentment and caprice.

It does no real work in the song, that “a-ha” - it’s an afterthought, another little hooky Easter Egg from a band committed to packing as much as they could into their tracks. No fault of ABBA’s, honestly, that for British listeners of a certain age and background (mine) it dominates the song now, that tiny bridging sigh cueing up a Norfolk bellow in the head - “Knowing me, knowing you - AH-HAAAAA!”.

Steve Coogan and Armando Ianucci’s selection of this mini-moment for Alan Partridge’s signature phrase was a stroke of cruel inspiration - too easy to take the Abigail’s Party route and make the monstrous (later tragic) Partridge a fan of, say, Manhattan Transfer: even that would have suggested a curiosity quite beyond Alan P’s galumphing populism. But it was also curiously ill-timed: Knowing Me Knowing You (the radio and TV show) started just before ABBA’s return to critical respectability. The sudden inescapable Partridgeness of this song made it a ghost at the new ABBA feast, a reminder that a corner of the fanbase would always be patterned sweaters and light ent.

The bad end of mundane, in other words, but mundane is what ABBA do so well: “Knowing Me Knowing You” is the first of their great wintry epics of boring grown-up heartbreak and the acceptance of heartbreak, trying to cadge a bit of hope out of a hopeless situation, balancing between the numbed verses and the wonderful cascades of backing harmonies from the guys on the chorus. It’s Frida’s star turn - though her first verse performance is a little wobbly - but Agnetha nearly steals it with her spectral whispers. The keyboards hit the grandeur they’re aiming for; the guitar solo doesn’t, but even in its forever-sabotaged state “Knowing Me Knowing You” has cohesion and power.

Manhattan Transfer smooth out and slick up Art and Dottie Todd’s song to such a degree that it becomes a pastiche of imagined Frenchness - an accordion, bof alors! - as much as a fifties throwback: what’s sacrificed in the process is vigour as well as (perhaps imagined) innocence. This “Chanson” may make for a good WTF-bomb as a chart-topper, but it’s also as soupy as any of the ballads we’ve sat through. Part of the problem is the vocalising, just on the edge of enjoyably preposterous with its chawn-sawn and its joooo tadoor, but not quite making it. But the “rat-a-ra-ta-ra” hook is the Crazy Frog nim-nim of its day, so points given just for brazen persistence.

Another in the recent string of soft, sumptuously arranged ballads, and like the others this is something I can think myself into enjoying - the polished class of the instrumentation in particular - but find it hard to feel. Some of my reserve is down to Sayer’s voice, which is like a thinned-out version of Elton and comes across as a little too whiney. On the positive side, the dynamics of “When I Need You” stop it being pure sap: good pause-and-punch effects on “it’s cold out - but hold out” and the chorus’ return after the sax break, and when Sayer starts improvising a little at the end it works as a payoff.

This is the first entry in Popular that I’ve written about extensively for Freaky Trigger before, in this long piece comparing different versions of the song. It’s one of my favourite longer FT pieces so this entry is very much an extract from it, since I’ve not changed my opinions on the track at all:

“Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” opens Act II of Evita, a musical I’ve never seen about a woman I know little of. I’d assumed it was a finale, but no: Eva Peron sings it as the wife of Argentina’s new president - the song is her address to the crowd who - we know from the start of the show - will come to adore her. Andrew Lloyd-Webber wrote the music, Tim Rice the lyrics. It’s a classic show-stopper: dramatic, lavishly orchestrated, and (potentially) catastrophically over-the-top. It’s also the only Lloyd-Webber/Rice song to have become more-or-less a standard - which is odd, given Evita’s very specific political context and content.

But something obviously registered - the song is corny enough to be memorable and subtle enough to be a challenge to anyone taking it on. It can stand alone, and “Argentina” can stand for anything you want. Which is just as well, since from the brief readings I’ve since made of Argentinian history Peronism is not my cup of mate. I got flamed on a file-sharing website for uploading one version - “an ode to a bloodythirsty dictator’s wife” wrote a fellow-member. This is unfair to Rice and Lloyd-Webber in context - where Eva’s politics are constantly questioned by the young radical Che - and out of context, where the song is too abstract to be an endorsement of anything much.

But that’s not to say it’s not a political song. Evita the musical premiered the year after Margaret Thatcher won the Tory leadership. Evita the film opened the Autumn before Princess Diana died. One reason “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” is a fascinating song is that it resonates so much in an era when women are entering and operating in the public arena at last; an arena whose rules, like the song, are written by men. The song’s mix of empathy, spin and steel, though, is not specifically ‘feminine’ - it’s just modern. Thatcher is not the modern Prime Minister who “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” most fits.

Covington’s version, from the British soundtrack album, forms a musical template for most other readings: the huge juddering strings, the rhetorical dynamics, the switch into a slow tango-tempo for the penultimate chorus. She doesn’t actually sing the final chorus, letting the song end with Eva’s vulnerable final appeal (“Have I said too much?”). But she doesn’t need to. In Covington’s hands it’s an entirely staged vulnerability - hers is the haughtiest reading of the tune, sung by a career-politician Evita whose peasant origins have long been cauterised. Her key lines? “Couldn’t stay all my life down at heel / Looking out of the window”, the crushing emphases signalling a swelling disgust at the very concept of weakness, of inertia.

Many performances of the song find the singer switching between singing to the imagined crowd and singing seemingly to herself. Covington’s, forceful and direct, doesn’t: it’s pure balcony address, pure rhetoric. And if you take “…Argentina” as rhetoric, a key question needs answering - what is the sung character trying to do? The central ambiguity of the song is its dual role as victory anthem and defensive self-justification. “How I still need your love after all that I’ve done” - after all I’ve achieved? Or - after all my sins? Power and guilt are united in the need for recognition. Listening again, though, that’s not how Covington sings it - on “I love you and hope you love me” she’s defiant. It is a hope, never a need - her love is unconditional.

There’s only a few professions more based in performance, more reliant on public acclaim - and more potentially dishonest - than politician. Pop singer is one of them, though in pop we can enjoy our demagogues more safely. “…Argentina” is Tim Rice’s finest hour, speechwriting as much as songwriting. The opening is perfect, grabbing the attention, wrong-footing the audience - “It won’t be easy, you’ll think it strange”: what won’t? What’s strange? - and then at once explaining, “how I still need your love”, before setting up another ambiguity, “after all that I’ve done.”. The verse sets the tone - Eva is being utterly frank, honest almost desite herself - and the rest of the song carries through. Rice keeps using the trick of starting a verse with something spontaneous-sounding - “I had to let it happen”; “Have I said too much?” - and then turning it into something more prepared, more cadenced (the chorus, for instance). This is great songwriting and great rhetoric both. And you have to ask that question again - how honest is Eva being? Is it all scripted? And you have to answer, “Of course it is”.

Pretty much as soon as I finish one Popular entry, the next song earworms its way into my head as a memo to self - get thinking about this. With “Don’t Give Up On Us”, though, something odd’s been happening - I can’t keep the song in my brain and it keeps shifting back into “If You Leave Me Now”. There’s not a lot of melodic similarity but the tracks share a theme and a sappy intensity - unfortunately Soul’s tune, while pleasant enough, comes off the loser in this mental war and floats off into insignificance.

If you’d had a crush on Soul in ‘77, though, this must have been pretty much perfect - the straight-to-camera video nailing its hammy intimacy perfectly. For me, it’s a bit of a drag, momentarily enlivened by the “I really lost my head last night…” middle eight, suddenly hinting at a way more interesting story behind the song. Tell us more, Dave! But the moment, all-too-quickly, passes.

And use the comments to discuss the year as a whole, if you like.

Thought of as a Christmas single, because of when it charted, this of course is actually a rare Number One hit that takes as its theme the Second Coming, which will be marked, according to Mathis, by everyone feeling quite nice for a little bit. Reducing the eschatalogical theology of the Christian faith to “Superbaby is coming to save us” lessens the record’s evangelical power but probably makes it more bearable: this is inoffensive schlock which glides by easily without ever threatening to win me over. That’s the fault of the material, not Mathis, who puts in a creamy, kindly performance: a bad record, but a good advert for its singer.

Note that this isn’t the same as “Should it be covered on Popular?” I’ll make that decision when the time comes (or may have already made it!).

A recurring theme on recent Popular comments threads has been the idea that one track or another represents “why punk had to happen”: a feeling - easy, perhaps too easy, to identify in hindsight - that pop and rock had stagnated or slipped into irrelevance. The phrase is slightly weaselly - it suggests that bad or dull records somehow caused punk, whereas more likely they provided the background conditions for it to be embraced. Anyway, here’s another candidate, at Number One when the Sex Pistols were first nosing into the charts and when John Peel was publically embracing the new music.

Showaddywaddy’s rock and roll revivalism - covering obscure numbers like this and more fondly recalled classics - is bouncily riskless, a jolly dead end. It’s the culmination of a turn back to rock’n'roll that’s been gathering pace for most of the decade, from the half-remembered inspirations of Roxy and T Rex, through the muscular callbacks and pantomime references in glam, and ending up at Showaddywaddy’s honks and vamps and put-on voices.

But the problem is that punk is also born - in part - out of that opening up of rock’n'roll and the 1950s as a well to draw on: viewed through a particular lens the back-to-basics, DIY spirit in punk is skiffle run through the greaser aggression of the Teddy Boys and rockers. Showaddywaddy are as effective an alternative to progressive “bloat” or complexity as punk was - they just seem like a less honourable one.

Their alternative won in the end, though: making soundalikes for 20 year old (or older!) records isn’t disreputable any more, far from it. I’ve seen pop-loving comrades digging tracks this year by Duffy, Alphabeat, and Annie which keep the revivalist spirit burning bright. Turns out it’s a Showaddywaddy world after all.