I've got sunshine on a cloudy day

Continuing my trip up the list of the most streamed songs for each year.  

1964 : My Girl - The Temptations


Another track I know and I quite like, but it has a bit of a twee side to it - I don't think I could listen to it too many times in a row.  But I can manage one more for the team...

Yeah, it's fine - coming in at our usual sub-three minute 2:45 with some fine vocals, with David Ruffin leading from the front, which I'm told wasn't normally the case up to this time.  Wikipedia tells us it was written by Smokey Robinson and Ronald White, a slightly less well-known Miracle - originally the plan was for The Miracles to record this with David on vocals, but the rest of The Temptations convinced Smokey to let them have it.  It reached #2 in the UK and #1 in the US, being both The Temptations and Motown Records first chart topper over there.

And that's all we've got from Wikipedia apart from one description of the track as "a pulsating, shuffle-wobble ballad" - whatever one of those is.  But there's no pop culture, no cover versions, no related facts, no nothing!  So, we have to look elsewhere for cover versions - I'm not expecting too many great ones, but let's see.  Ah yes - I'm immediately proved wrong by Otis Redding's version (which I've already met), Cannibal & The Headhunters (an American-Mexican band who supported The Beatles at Shea Stadium, apparently), The Mamas & The Papas, The Righteous Brothers, The Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, Al Green, Michael Jackson, Glen Campbell, Dolly Parton, The Jesus & Mary Chain (I bet this version is really quite something), Brigitte Neilsen (the mind boggles), Phil Collins and Keke Okereke.  And this was a very small percentage of the total number - there were a LOT of them.

Once again, I'm feeling this year is represented by a US song which doesn't have a great deal of specific relevance to the UK - pop culture references include a load of movies (including, go on - guess) but that's about it.  I'm guessing the competition might feature The Beatles - shall we see?  Ah yes, the top selling UK single was "Can't Buy Me Love" and "A Hard Day's Night" and "I Feel Fine" also topped the charts.  Singles from other groups that jumped out at me were Cilla Black's "Anyone Who Had A Heart", The Animals "The House Of The Rising Sun" and Petula Clark's "Downtown".  Songs from the US chart include Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman", Mary Wells's "My Guy" (which has a pleasing symmetry to it), Dionne Warwick's "Anyone Who Had a Heart" (more symmetry!) and The Supremes' "Baby Love".

So yeah, The Temptations track is a fine track but it feels a bit like whoever pulled this list together picked it out of a hat - I actually suspect "Pretty Woman" must have run it close.  A top ten from every year would be interesting - but I suspect that might be asking too much!

1963 - Probably my favourite so far
1965 - A very strong year

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more