Owning Number One

There used to be something good about owning the number one single of the week. It was almost as if some of the artist’s success had attached itself to you. Better still if you’d bought the record while it was still on its way up the charts, so that when it hit the top spot it validated your musical taste and your ability to spot a hit. All this, of course, rather depended on the quality of the record in question. Surely not many music fans got a good feeling from owning Ken Dodd’s ‘Tears’, number one for five weeks in 1965, or Englebert Humperdinck’s ‘Release Me’ which annexed the top spot for six weeks during March and April of 1967. But in general, the records that made number one during the 1960s and, to some extent the 70s were all deserving of their hit status. Owning a number one single by The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks or any number of class acts of the era was like wearing a badge of honour. Conversely, since the 1990s, when the charts came increasingly to be dominated by manufactured acts and worthless novelty songs, ownership of the week’s number one single was not always something to be advertised, and the same thing still applies today – even more so, as the pop charts have been reduced to an irrelevance populated by acts of uniform blandness.

I thought it would be interesting to go back through the charts of the past six decades and pick out the number one singles that myself and my brother owned at the time. Anything bought after the fact didn’t count, which ruled out everything by The Beatles – we didn’t own a single Beatle record until 1974. To qualify, we needed to have owned the single – or its album equivalent – at the time that it made number one in the charts, or so close to the time as to make no difference. Wikipedia has handy lists of every UK number one record going right back to the beginning of the pop charts, organised by decades, so it was an easy task to scroll down and pick out the number ones that we’d owned. All told, there were just 26 of them, spanning the years 1964 to 2002. One or two of them were slightly surprising, but on the whole, with only a few exceptions, there was nothing there to cause undue embarrassment. Or, indeed, baggy trousers...

These 26 records were, of course, the mere tip of an iceberg. Between us, my brother and myself had plenty of records in our collections, both singles and albums, originally bought for us by our mum and dad, sometimes purchased with tokens or our own money. Often, we would wait until singles had dropped out of the chart in order to buy them at a reduced price. And beyond the records we actually owned were the many others that we liked well enough but were happy to hear as and when they turned up on the radio or television. Some of my favourite and best remembered songs of the 60s and 70s belong in that category.

The first single I ever had bought for me also happened to be number one at the time. Herman’s Hermits’ (pictured above) ‘I’m Into Something Good’ reached the top of the charts on 24 September 1964, and remained there for just two weeks. During this time, I remember being taken into our local record store – actually an electrical goods retailer that sold records as a sideline – and having the single bought for me. I don’t know if I’d asked for it, but I certainly liked it. Our mum made the purchase, so she evidently considered Herman’s Hermits to be acceptable listening for me at the age of just three and a half. They were nice boys, well-scrubbed, unthreatening, and the song was a jaunty lightweight singalong. And it was number one in the charts, a fact I may have dimly perceived at the time. I was literally, myself, ‘into something good’. It wasn’t the first pop record that had worked its way into my consciousness – I’d been noticing songs on the radio from a very young age indeed, and can recollect hearing some of the earliest Beatle records – ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ – around the time of their appearance in the charts.

I wasn’t bought very many pop singles during the 1960s, and of those 26 number ones, just seven are from that decade. The next number one that found its way into my hands was Manfred Mann’s ‘The Mighty Quinn’ which made the top spot on 14 February 1968, during the half term holiday. It came from the chemist’s. John Frosts in Sutton Coldfield also had a modest record department, and at the time was one of the few places in the town town from which you could buy singles and LPs. I can still remember seeing that week’s edition of Top of the Pops, and feeling slightly pleased that I had this week’s top-selling single in my collection. That’s collection as in two singles.

I picked another number one again later in the year: Hugo Montenegro’s cover of Ennio Morricone’s main title theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly topped the charts on 13 November 1968. We were in the record department of WH Smith in Lichfield around that time (I remember being intrigued at the lenticular sleeve of the Rolling Stones’ Satanic Majesties LP), and I had the single in my hand, ready to take to the counter. Then, at the last minute, I changed my mind, deciding instead to have The Gun’s ‘Race With the Devil’ bought for me, a frantic heavy rock workout with the weirdest guitar tones I’d ever heard. Strange choice…

1969 saw a unique situation when, between us, my brother and myself had four consecutive number one records bought for us. This had never happened before and would never happen again. The singles in question were Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’ (29 January), the Move’s ‘Blackberry Way’ (5 February), Amen Corner’s ‘(If Paradise is) Half as Nice’ (12 February) and Peter Sarstedt’s ‘Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?’ (26 February). The reason for this cluster of chart toppers is easily explained – my brother’s birthday is in early February, my own a month later, and we had these singles bought for us as presents (I can’t recall whether we were influenced by their chart-topping status). In the chart of 12-18 February, three of them occupied the top of the charts – Amen Corner at number one had just bumped Fleetwood Mac down to number two whilst the Move were waiting at number three to make their own assault on the top spot.

Of these four number ones, I owned only one – Amen Corner. My brother, just turned six years old, was emerging as the ‘serious’ music fan in the household. I liked them all well enough but was aghast at the sight of the Move when they appeared on Top of the Pops: I’d never seen so much hair! When Roy Wood sang ‘what am I supposed to do now?’ I answered, without missing a beat, ‘get a haircut!’

The next single I had bought for me that year was another number one – Zager and Evans’ apocalyptic folk-rock ditty ‘In the Year 2525’. I remember watching them strumming their acoustic guitars, perched on stools in the film clip shown on Top of the Pops and thinking I’d quite like to do that myself (strum a guitar, not sit on a stool…) My next number one is one of the few it’s somewhat shameful to admit to owning. Even before we knew the truth about him, Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’ was not the kind of single that you’d boast about to your friends. But I liked it well enough, even if I didn’t quite grasp its anti-war message, and had it bought for me at Christmas 1969. It became the first number one single of the new decade, holding the top spot for the whole of January until replaced on the very last day of the month by Edison Lighthouse’s ‘Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)’ – which I also had bought for me. Another two consecutive number ones – but they were to be the last.

Around this same time, I was bought the novelty single ‘Gimme Dat Ding’, the perpetrators of which, The Pipkins, appeared on TOTP the same week as Edison Lighthouse. I remember noticing the resemblance between their vocalists. There was an excellent reason for this – they were one and the same person, session singer Tony Burrows.

Our hit-spotting run of early 1969 was never to be repeated. During 1970, there were plenty of good nunber one records (and, of course, the bloody awful ‘In the Summertime’), but only one of them made it into our house – the England World Cup Squad’s overly-optimistic anthem ‘Back Home’, which made number one on 16 May. Getting to the top of the charts and walking off with the World Cup was just too much to hope for…

From late 1970 through to the spring of 1971, I took no interest in the pop charts, for reasons that now escape me. There weren’t a lot of great songs around in any case, and the only one of that era that I really noticed – for all the wrong reasons – was Clive Dunn’s ‘Grandad’, which hit the top on 9 January 1971. Fortunately for our future credibility as music fans, neither myself nor my brother had this bought for us. It was a narrow escape, I suppose, as it was the kind of record that I’m sure was foisted on a lot of kids as a paen to their own grandparents. I hated it.

1971 was topped and tailed by novelty records from TV comedians, and in December my very modest record collection clocked up another number one in the form of ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’. No shame in that, surely? We even lived at ‘number 22’ ourselves, though not, of course in ‘Lily Lane’. In my mind’s eye I can still see the accompanying film with Benny Hill squaring up to Henry McGee’s ‘Two Ton Ted’, that was shown for weeks on Top of the Pops. I can even recite all the lyrics in the voice of Benny Hill. Is that a ‘no’?

The next chart-topping single to make it into our household was another ‘novelty’ hit, one of those bizarre fluke number ones that used to pop up now and then. The Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards released a bagpipe rendition of the 1772 hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ which not only reached number one in the charts (on 15 April 1972) but became the year’s best selling single and was an international hit. I hate the sound of the bagpipes and can plead not guilty here, though my brother won’t relish being reminded that it was, to the best of my knowledge, bought on his behest (although I suspect our mum may have exerted some influence).

There were plenty of iconic number one records during the 1970s, but almost none of them found their way into our hands, and I went for almost the entire decade without owning any more number one singles. In 1973 I owned the number one piece of sheet music when 10CC’s ‘Rubber Bullets’ made number one on 23 June 1973. How I laughed when, in that week’s Beano, Minnie the Minx substituted the sheet music for ‘this week’s number one record’ for the sedate chamber music being played by a quartet of old biddies who immediately went into overdrive. Ironically, 10CC’s next album was called Sheet Music.

The same thing happened when Pilot’s single ‘January’ reached number one in – uh – February of 1975. I bought the sheet music rather than the single. In fact, I think I had it in my mind to get the song on an LP whenever it became available but it somehow never happened, or at least not until many, many years later. By this time, I’d gone off singles altogether, and now preferred to play albums, so it was in LP form that I owned 10CC’s ‘I’m Not in Love’ when it topped the charts on 28 June 1975. I’d had the album The Original Soundtrack since Easter.

Over four years would elapse before I owned any more contemporary number one hits, and I’m not sure I can allow them in because they came into my possession, as tracks on albums, weeks or even months after their original chart appearances. So, it’s more of an honourable mention for The Police with ‘Message in a Bottle’ and ‘Walking on the Moon’. Likewise Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ which I hated on release but finally allowed into my collection when I bought the album The Kick Inside two years later.

I went out and bought the Police’s ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’ when it was released in the autumn of 1980, which probably makes it the first number one single I owned prior to its topping the charts – although by this time in the band’s career, it’s chart-topping status was more or less a foregone conclusion. The following year, I already owned ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ on the Ghost in the Machine album when the single reached number one on 14 November.

In all, I owned ten number one hits of the 1980s at the time they topped the charts. Some, like Madness’s ‘House of Fun’ I’d prefer to forget, and I’ve long since disposed of the Housemartins’ acapella Christmas hit ‘Caravan of Love’. I’m not wild about admitting to having bought Spandau Ballet’s ‘True’ in its trendy David Band sleeve, but I’m afraid it’s, er, true… and as for Cliff and the Young One’s irreverent cover of Lionel Bart’s ‘Living Doll’, if I find it still lurking anywhere amongst my records, I’ll be sure to dispatch it to the nearest charity shop – although the dustbin would require less effort.

Topping the list of ‘oh my God, did I really go out and buy that’ is the ‘novelty’ (if that’s the right word) dance hit of September 1992 ‘Ebeneezer Goode’. Oh the shame(n)! I have no idea what possessed me to wish to own this piece of nonsense other than the idea that it had so permeated the fabric of reality at the time through endless radio play that it might in the future aquire a patina of 90s nostalgia. Pull the other one! Got any salmon? Sorted…

Equally embarrassing to own up to is Oasis’s 2002 single ‘The Hindu Times’ which a friend recommended to me. It didn’t cost a lot, maybe around a quid, and I played it but once. There just wasn’t a bloody tune there…

So we come to the last, the very last number one record that I went out and bought. It was June 2002 and the record in question was ‘A Little Less Conversation’, an obscure 1968 Elvis cut that had been given an injection of contemporary chart steroids by Dutch multi-instrumentalist and composer (according to Wikipedia) Tom Holkenborg, AKA ‘Junkie XL’ or just plain JXL. Whoever and whatever he was, his production was a huge improvement on the song in its original form.

And there you have it – from Herman’s Hermits to Elvis – my own personal story of chart-topping hits. It seems almost like a trip backwards, from a 60s act to a 50s act whose late 60s recording was remixed in the 21st century. Are you still with me?

By the time I clocked out, the charts were becoming a place to avoid, with worthless one-off dance or, God help us, trance acts trading places at the top on an almost weekly basis with boy bands, junk groups like Aqua and the era’s ‘big hitters’ like Robbie Williams, Kylie and Oasis. Adding to the horror were novelties aimed at children, like singles from Teletubbies and Bob the Builder, both of them shameless commercial cash-ins from people who should have known better.

Today, I couldn’t name you a single chart act. Just scrolling through the list of number ones since the year 2000 is a depressing business where I find myself constantly asking ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’. The plain fact is that being number one used to mean something and today it means less than nothing. To reach number one in the 1960s, an act had to sell in the tens of thousands, if not millions. Today, I’ve no idea nor interest in how many streams it takes to get into the charts, but it’s no way near the colossal sales enjoyed by the artists of pop’s golden age. Pop today is all too often merely one facet of a multi-media mix designed to promote the latest shiny young piece of talent. Which strikes me as an utterly specious reason for making music...