1001 Greatest Pop Songs

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #49 - Goody Two Shoes by Adam Ant

2009-01-02T19:23:00.000-08:00

Alyson: A recent very flimsy attempt by an Australian paper to claim the girl in the film clip to this very song looks like Sarah Palin (you remember her - and even more unlikely are certain Youtube clips trying to claim Goddard looks like Julian McMahon) sparked a minor re-interest around these parts in Adam Ant - well, they played the clip at 3am on VH1. Anyway, as it happens, it had been many years since I had heard this song, my most normal exposure to Adam Ant is the long forgotten "Young Parisians" on one of my compilation tapes that has long succumbed to the ravages of time (and who makes tapes in 2009 anyway?). Hearing this song again was like being re-united with a faithful old friend from school - along with the singles of Nik Kershaw and early Bananarama and now Strawberry Switchblade, this was always one of my favourite 80s songs, and it sort of got forgotten about in my mind. I still remembered the basics about the song (the chorus, what it was about, the English press thinking he was boring, the girl in it was a Bond Girl I think, and it was a solo song not Adam And The Ants cos he trampled on the Ants). But hearing it again, even at 3am, was amazing. Of course some tedious sub Toby Cresswell VJ had to ruin it by making a crack about "the 80s", and his clothes, missing the point that one day their label dictated surf fashion will look utterly ridiculous on a compilation tape sometime around 2020...kids eh?

So here's what I love about this song and why it's on the list. Firstly, it's absolutely amazing. Obviously. By any fair assessment it's a fantastic song surely? It's got so much downright swagger, it's just infectious. It contains some wonderful drum work, a B side called Crackpot History that is dying for someone to cover it, and somewhat against the run of play was knocked off #1 in the UK by Charleen (not from Neighbours). There aren't many songs that pack so much creativity, energy and enjoyment into themselves in a short space of time. There's more ideas in this song than some peoples careers. That's the really main thrust of it for me - there's technical excellence, yes, and it's a very clever song, yes, but like Katrina and The Waves it's just so astonishingly FUN, that an accurate summation of it's prowess isn't really required. All that is required is probably an ability to get up and dance to it, and yes, toothpaste across the nose is mandatory...

However, it's mainly on the list because...who makes this much EFFORT anymore for their songs? Seriously. The TOTP performance was ridiculously energetic, with no fewer than four sets of dancers roped in for Anty to jump around with. One of them whacks him in the stomach and still he ploughs on. Who can you imagine jumping over a bed in the film clip these days and absolutely caning themselves when they don't land on the mat? It seems watching on the invaluable Youtube (though not as invaluable as it once was) that every single time he was on a TV show doing this song, something completely different would happen, but it was always packed with commitment and energy. One performance features dancing furniture and Anty slapping his own hand for making the peace sign, another is just him dancing around a lit up stage like a maniac, another features a hip smashing dance routine with the solid gold dancers, and yet another has him sitting calmly (well calmly for him) in a room filling up with foam. You just can't imagine in this day and age of tightly managed public appearances someone being so willing to, yes, be ridiculed just to entertain.

For that alone, he'd be on the list...a room full of foam? I mean...who!

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #48 - Song #1 by Serebro

2009-01-02T18:45:00.001-08:00

Claire: When sourpuss UK commentators bemoan the lack of potential for a British victory, they tend to overlook the paucity of their own song selections. After all, a pop gem in the form of "It's You!" by The Revelations was overlooked in favour of a tedious wine bar ballad everyone has already forgotten. It is from the east of Europe that most of the Eurovision drama comes from, and no co-incidentally, they mostly provide the best songs, and then they win. Sure, there's some dodgy block voting going on, but quality is quality. They don't send Gemini now do they? In 2007, Georgia sent an excellent OPUS III style ballad from Sopho, that had a film clip which suggested Georgia invented the light bulb. And then there was Serebro, runners up in a hideous travesty of nonsense. A wonderfully old fashioned in the lab pop group, they even had a svengali and some kind of wonderfully made up back story that just read like complete nonsense. That they came out of the traps with one of the 00s best pieces of out and out pop is, as seasoned observers of this kind of thing would guess, not a massive surprise. They had it all figured out before they started...they even have a logo. Britain sent Scooch. Not rigged at all then Wogan?

I must admit serious personal surprise that several "pop" websites who spent a lot of 2007 bemoaning the death of quality pop didn't get behind the Russians fully. After all, all the things bemoaned by said sites, namely that bands don't have a lot of glamour (Serebro had it in spades), songs with extended dance breaks (there's more or less two in Song #1s film clip), or don't really enjoy some serious lyrical trash (Song #1 has the best pie/sex interface since Noiseworks Hot Chilli Woman). They even went to the trouble to make no fewer than 13 remixes of the song, including a "black" version which was probably the second best song of last year. It is such a wonderful mix of fun and wonder and tongue in cheek camp without ever becoming disrespectful or parody, you wonder why everyone else struggles with it. They even went to the trouble of making about three or four versions of the film clip before settling on the one below, the dance mix version which revives the old pop tradition of dancing around in a car park for no apparent reason. And yet people still bought Rihanna albums...madness...absolute madness...

They don't seem to have followed it up with anything anywhere near as good - there is a song in which they stand amazed as a whale jumps over their head. Like Britney Spears, when you have such a wonderful debut single, it can be very hard to top. Unlike Britney Spears though, they didn't call Melissa Joan Hart, just the makers of Free Willy. On such delicate decisions can fates turn...this is amazing...lest we forget...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #47 - The Math by Hilary Duff

2008-01-26T15:57:00.000-08:00

Claire: In the best possible way, this list is pretty much an open ended homage to people who don't get the credit they deserve. At some point, some of these artists have released at least one magical and uplifting pop moment that has cheered us all up massively, but who for some reason have to a back seat on great song lists to some tired old whinger singing about the hands on clocks. Most rock criticism ultimately renders itself irrelevant out of carping, and this list, for what it's worth, is all about the joy. The fact is, if a song is great, it's origin shouldn't matter, and as we've said before, that it is, well, if aliens ever land, they'll shoot us all out of confusion.

On some such godforsaken panel show that reviews the decade, tiresome alterna comedians will debate the brief Lohan v Duff feud with some incredible insights as "what was all that about" (Joel Stein will be involved). Both girls have had their highs and lows, most of Hilarys lows revolving around her sister or trying to claim she could rock, with Lindsays revolving around leaving the house to head to clubs and asking her daddy for a hug. Both artists made great pop music, then went pretty rubbish when they started seeking credibility and maturity. Duff at least ended up out the other end relatively sane as far as we know, which probably gives her a plus point. Musically, maybe Duff had the edge, once Lindsay started getting raw and losing the plot...like we said, we'll leave it to the lame comedians. Suffice to say, for a small period of time, they were both in an imperial phase, especially musically.

The Math, insanely never released as a single from the peerless pop album Metamorphosis, is arguably the best song released by either girl, at worst tied with Lindsay Lohans Ultimate. With an extended love is like maths vocal chant, a homage to the classic double meaning lyrics of the early bubblegum classics, this song is a fantastic and fun ball of energy and life. With no other inclination than to make people happy, this song is wonderful and delirious, with some surely subversive, baiting and sarcastic heavy metal guitars thrown in to keep the song motoring along. "If you can't do the math," sings Hilary, "then get out the equation!" - a million rock critics tut and tediously talk about pub bands, a million teenage girls sing along joyously into their hair brush. I have no doubt which camp I'd rather be in.

This is a majestic, hidden classic. Shame about her sister...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #46 - Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and The Waves

2008-01-26T04:34:00.000-08:00

Alyson: I've never been able to understand the shame that some reviewers seem to feel towards happy music. As most rock critics sit in judgement of bubblegum pop and look down their nose at the ability to create something with the ability to uplift, so mere "pop" and the ability to create great infectious tunes is not often analyzed. The fact is, the line between ringtone novelty and genuinely affecting pop tune is a fine one sometimes, and it takes a genuine effort to make a magical landmark pop moment. It's an under-appreciated skill, and one that hopefully this list will go some way to address.

Katrina and The Waves, for one, got it absolutely spot on one spectacular time. A driving new wave band who built up a fan base throughout Canada, and who would later fall apart through infighting and drugs, had the skill to make a song of sheer relentless optimism, and still retain their so called credibility. That their moment in the sunshine was so brief is a shame, as they worked long and hard to get to a certain point in their career. However, rarely, their one big hit was their best song, and it was genuinely difficult to see just how they could top a song of such absolute perfection at any other point in their musical career.

Walking On Sunshine, a song surely no-one on the planet could hate, is absolute bubblegum, cheerful irrestible sunshine froth. Despite repeated playings across the years, it still retains all of it's wide eyed delirious charm. A re-worked version of an earlier minor hit in Canada, it's the ultimate in feel good musical fun. It also has the benefit of one of the 1980s greatest, most relentless hooks, and one of musics greatest ever outros. Written with absolute precision by former Soft Boy Kimberley Rew, the joyous way that the song ends has more charm and magic than the collected works of every tired old "classic rock" song put together. Katrina almost becomes possessed by the songs final moments. Without a single doubt, this is optimism made tangible, magic on record, delightful and perfect.

It's still the happiest, least goth song of all time - bonus points for that...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #45 - 3 Small Words by Josie And The Pussycats

2008-01-21T01:54:00.001-08:00

Alyson: I am, it's without question, the worlds biggest Josie And The Pussycats fan. It's not even a question, and it's not so much the fun ears and long tails and sense of early 1970s girl power and fantastic merchandise (I bought a Josie frisbee at auction once, that glows in the dark - brilliant) from the cartoon, but also, the wonderful, lost classic album of bubblegum pop which contains such masterworks as Voodoo, La La La (If I Had You) (which is my all time favourite song) and songs as good as Lie Lie Lie, of which more later, Voodoo and which was described by one reference book as the best album the Jackson 5 never recorded. Of course, being "just" a cartoon band, the album sunk without trace, and fetches four figures these days at least for the lucky few who own it, but it's such a magical pop landmark, it makes your head hurt to think no one bought it.

So then i hear Disney are planning a remake live action film of the original capering cartoons (which were, basically, Scooby Doo episodes with girls) one day back in 2001, and for a few days, depression sinks in. After all, can you imagine this day and age a movie with Tara Reid being any good? However, such snobbish judgement befouls me. In fact, the spirit of the original Josie album (which fact fans featured vocals from Cheryl Ladd) is more than held up by the energy invested in the film and album by messrs Reid, Dawson and Cook in the lead roles. After all, while far from perfect, how can you not love a film in which Melody proclaims that if she could go back in time, her #1 goal would be to meet Snoopy?

Luckily, if the rest of the film has stunk (which it didn't) and I had felt like hanging up the ears, 3 Small Words would have made the entire excercise worthwhile. It remains absolutely perfect bubblegum pop from go to whoa. The song is nothing more than a wonderful sticky sweet trap of thundering guitars, lusty vocals and absolute enjoyment. Faster and sexier than the original Josie songs, it lives up to the original core rule of bubblegum - make the lyrics darker than you might originally think. The lament that "you can't see that I'm the one" is the sting in the frothy tail, a melancholy lyric that belies the bubbly arrangement. However, for that, this is nothing but fun, thundering power pop to be played loud and proud and whenever possible - and clocking in at just a tick over two minutes, it's a song no one could ever get sick of.

It is, without a question, a 5 star triple threat...now where are those ears?

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #44 - Eurodisco by Bis

2008-01-12T01:40:00.000-08:00

Alyson: In the truest sense, ridicule really isn't anything to afraid of. Given everyone cops it at some point in a self important music media, a band that you feel passionately about one way or another is surely a good thing. Ardal O'Hanlon used to say the third Oasis album acted like a cleaner for his CD player since after listening to it, every album he owned sounded better. After all, without a violent hatred of Creed, would you really appreciate majestic perfect pop? Without the slappable face of yer man from Nickelback, would you really appreciate, say, Into the Groove? Given the caution shown by say nothing pop stars, it's a shame controversy and creating music that actually causes opinion is almost dying out in radio land.

Scot poppers Bis, for instance, set themselves up as a love them or loathe them musical act by singing about Sweetshops and Kids in a bratty bubblepunk way without a care in the world, twenty somethings with the carefee attitude of ten year olds, and then appearing on Top Of The Pops before technically they were signed (the first band to do so). To their fans though, who showered them with immediate devotion, their audacious energy and tuneful shouting was wonderful and childlike and of course it was sniffed at by snobby music critics. However, with 1999s "Social Dancing" album (one of the 90s best albums), the punk discord and railing against tuneless techno and faceless dance, combined with stunning pop and disco tunes, was a mature, perfect revelation, designed to move head and heart. The best song you never heard is future list induction Listen Up, and having glammed up lead singer Manda Rin - as well as turning her into a singer rather than a shouter - and beefed up the production budget, mega stardom should have been theirs. Alas, it was not to be, as you got the feeling they always knew deep down. Still, at one point they had the fastest selling foreign album for a foreign act in Japanese history, so someone out there was listening. This is the nation that embraced Shampoo as well, so they seem to be onto something over there...

Lead single from Social Dancing, the late 1998 single Eurodisco, is a revelation in more ways than one. Not just tunefully, with a throbbing bass line and an incessant nagging beat that's perfect to dance to. But lyrically, tearing into the very genre the tune comes from, dancefloor rooted disco, the song makes you think if you take the time to stop and listen to the lyrics - and tearing into disco with a disco song is the kind of conundrum rock critics lose their hair over. Whatever. Eurodisco is fabulous fun, mixed with a world weary and unique Scottish brand of tired cynicism. No wonder it didn't sell, just describing how pop this sweet can also be so tart is tough enough, let alone selling it to the public. A band supposedly so dumb made one of the cleverest albums of the last decade. Figure that one out rock critics...

This is majestic. Lest we forget.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #43 - Vacation by Vitamin C

2008-01-11T15:46:00.000-08:00

Claire: If the magical period of the late 90s goes down as the last great period for shiny plastic pop, the last time labels invested in proper pop music without sticking in a pointless Timbaland beat or a tacked on rap verse, at least our pop went out with a bang. Strange as it may seem, the ultimate soundtrack to this glorious Pre-Idol era was the soundtrack to a cartoon that still makes absolutely no sense. The soundtrack to Pokemon The Movie might have contained the odd duff time filler (Blessd Union Of Souls anyone?) but the rest of the line up? Britney. B*Witched. M2M. Emma Bunton. Christina Aguilera. Billie Piper. N-Sync. And more, truly ensuring that chronologers of the late 90s pop scene need a copy of the Pokemon soundtrack to truly relive the era, of course, even if that gives money to the most baffling cartoon rubbish (and the movie, incidentally, was apparently SO confusing, it killed the franchise, so consider how odd it must have been) of all time.

Oddly, the alumni of late 90s Pop are gathered together in one place and then comprehensively outshone on the soundtrack by the greatest piece of pop you never heard made by a relatively minor pop name. Having attacked Ricki Lake in Hairspray, Colleen Fitzpatrick pottered around the fringes of (ugh) indie respectability with Eve's Plum, but her correct desire to be Debbie Harry shone through even then. Citing Blondie as an influence in every single interview was another positive step. However, recast as Vitamin C, mystifyingly her only hit was the dreck that is Graduation (Friends Forever), sloppy American high school rubbish akin to listening to that musical that boy with no penis made last year that made her rich but did nothing else. A shame because her work otherwise is nigh on peerless. The Itch, her indie baiting cover of Last Nite, the vastly under-rated Smile, all stayed shamelessly to the ideals of plastic pop, and best of all, she truly craved fame and would do anything to get it. Truly, the best kind of pop star. Alas, she never quite got there, as much as anything, for burying her best cut in the midst of a poorly purchased movie tie in.

Vacation is without doubt one of the greatest pop songs of all time. Based around the pop theory that while a guitar in it's place is sometimes OK, a surf guitar is much better, there is so much to enjoy. Whether it's the rampaging child like chorus, the breakdown in the middle with as much old skool scratching as your heart could desire with organ madness mixed in, the burnt through pop desire to escape the mundane of every day life and head to the beach of the lyrics, this is classic over the top throw in the kitchen sink pop production, in the best possible sense. The vibrancy and fun throughout the song propel it into top league of pop perfection.

This is pure 100% pleasure. If anyone could resist a homage to the faux surf parties of the 50s, they have a heart of stone. However, if you want a homage to "everyone leaves school and they'll get along forever", well, for some reason, THAT was a single...gee...can't figure out what she never made it to the big time...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #42 - Picnic In The Summertime by Deee-Lite

2008-01-09T23:20:00.000-08:00

Tina T: Contrary to popular belief, the early 1990s weren't some barren musical wasteland while everyone was sitting around waiting for Nirvana to invent themselves and hair metal to die out. In fact, in Australia, it was a magical time for pop, although a nostalgic fondness for youth blots out the worst excesses of the day. Fine to focus on Girlfriend, say, or Melissa, but Phil Collins was still a viable artist, and so was Michael Jackson. However, the one musical trick an early 90s pop fan could count on was a languid summer jam at some point. Contrary to popular belief, not all "songs of summer" ring with bombast and hystrionics. There are days of lying around in the heat that require a soundtrack as well. After invocations from DJ Jazzy Jeff and De La Soul (not pop but the groove was), the practice more or less died with Inner "sounds of summer my arse" Circle in 1993, but there is still a great attraction to a song that invokes the feelings of summer in the same way an early 90s summer jam does.

Deee-Lite, of course, remain one of the best bands of all time. Certainly it's a strange mystery than none of their other songs kicked into the higher reaches of the charts. In Lady Miss Kier, self styled after the drag queen Lady Kier (a man, baby), they had someone with the requisites to be a superstar. Fashionable, beautiful, and a fantastic dancer, backed up and connected with the likes of Bootsy Collins and DJ Towa Tei, it's strange Deee-Lite rank as one hit wonders, but still, what a one hit. They carried on making sumptuous music to those of us still listening however, and the majesty of LMKs harlequin jump suit shimmying to the beat is enough to assure them a forever glorious status within the pop community.

One of the non hits (remember, we're as dedicated to them as were hits, although if Groove...isn't on this list, something is very wrong), 1994s Picnic In The Summertime (from the album Dewdrops in the Garden) is the most undeserving of it's commercial failure. Perhaps more than anything else, it's fantastically stylish and cool, subtle and funky without ever over playing it's hand. It's unsurprising that a Lady Miss Kier song should have such a fantastic groove, although it's lazy and loping rather than loud and proud. The songs light, breezy qualities perfectly invoke a feeling of long days in the sun, thinking the world will never end. LMKs vocals are delightfully laid back and tropical, and the song radiates with positive energy without ever sounding like the work of hippies. In short, it's absolutely magnificent.

One hit wonders on sad VH1 lists maybe, but devotees know better. Deee-Lite always groove just right. In the heart, and in the park.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #41 - Ultimate by Lindsay Lohan

2008-01-09T01:07:00.000-08:00

Claire: As I write this, the worlds single greatest pop star is somewhere or other, on some substance or other and avoiding Dr Phils sweaty clutches. The worlds single greatest pop band of all time are on a chicken, scampi and cabaret included style re-union tour that seems somewhat less dignified than your drunken auntie doing karaoke (which accounts for Geraldines singing). And for what's it's worth, the potentially greatest pop star of your generation has to all intents and purposes nailed the coffin shut on what should have been a glittering and dazzling musical career of magical pop trash tunes, with the occasional dabble in high quality balladry thrown in. And somehow, Alicia Keys is allowed to keep singing. It's just not fair. Some things just aren't meant to be. I smell a conspiracy from people who want the boring to prevail. Anyway, so who was this high quality pop star?

Her name was Lindsay Lohan. She was going to be fantastic.

Oh sure, don't believe me, but admit it, it started SO well. Well, if you ignore the Parent Trap. What the hell was all THAT about? But Freaky Friday? Mean Girls, the Clueless of it's generation? Confessions? Great, great movies, admit it. And the music career, it was wonderful, for a time. For it had absolutely NO merit other than the sheer desire to entertain, and if you don't think Speak is the greatest pop album of it's year, I can't help you. It's glittery, shimmery, tuneful and sensational. And what about Drama Queen (That Girl)? And if you wonder what really killed Lindsay Lohan, well, yes, the skankiness and the drugs and not turning up to things like, you know, the set, that didn't help. But in truth, it's the self importance. Once pop stars of her potential start thinking and getting earnest (raw), it's never going to work. You can scream for Daddy to give you a hug, but you won't be getting one red cent from the pop demographic. Down the route of self importance (raw) lies Bob Dylan and sodding Alicia Keys. It could never ever work.

Ultimate (the closing song of Freaky Friday) is as good as a lost jam session single from the almighty Go-Gos (the start is very Vacation, for what it's worth). In the best possible way, this song is chaotic, dis-organised and messy, and in the best possible way (ie. it's not done for some Santana style wankfest) it has a fantastic short guitar riff. There's something so energetic and fresh about the whole song, at a time when Lindsay Lohan could have been something other than just a sub Tara Reid. The way she says "You're it!" is wonderful and child-like. It's still one of the best bouncy pop rock songs, nay, pop rock anthems around. The thing about it is, in contrast to Lohan these days, it's so much damn FUN. In many ways, this should have been the launch of quite a glittering pop career. Lord knows, as we've found out, she had the attitude. If she'd stuck to making such peerless psuedo-innocent pop songs, the world was her oyster.

And then, she lost it. And the world was left with Alicia Keys "singing her heart out". Sigh, the world is cold and unfathomable...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #40 - Bouffant Headbutt by Shampoo

2008-01-07T01:25:00.000-08:00

Claire: In the way that a far more tedious list than this (hi Toby!) would obsess over such boring things as lineage and creative debts, the only thing we probably will care about in this list is the origins of the phrase "Girl Power". Girlfriend said it in 1992, Helen Love said it 1993, and of course, the sensational Spice Girls put it on a T-shirt in 1996 and trademarked until the second Geri left (at which point, they trademarked Lame Power, but that's another argument). However, the true holders of Girl Power, with a song with the same title, came from Plumstead and would smack you in the face if you tried to mention trademark or copyright issues. It's hard to imagine someone making a line of crisps with these girls on the packet - in the best possible way, this entry is dedicated to the Sex Pistols (after all, just as "contrived") of bubblegum, a band who would never engage in bonding sessions on Channel 5.

Shampoo, the creative sneering creation of Jacqui and Carrie, lived entirely in their own world, and are in many ways the single greatest pop band in the history of the word. Unapolagetically trashy, rude, and desirous of your very heart to burn, they are also fantastically funny, witty, bratty and entertaining on and off record. Of course, there is an act at the heart of it all, but as they gloriously slaughter everything that is sacred in mid 90s Britain in a far more insightful and genuine way than Blur ever did. Long before Avril Lavigne, Shampoo were doing trashy bubblegum pop punk and making an album called "We Are Shampoo" which is unstopabbly perfect. That this is a cruel world, such genius and such dedication to NOT being a two dimensional easy to pin down dumb bimbo while still bringing the wonderful tunes and changing their mind mid interview on which bands they liked group meant they were never the world straddling band they should have been. In the best possible way, Shampoo were kitsch, plastic and oh so very mighty.

Just ask them, they'd tell you. Is that not inspirational?

Bouffant Headbutt, often listed as the girls debut release (no one seems to remember Blisters and Bruises) and of all things released on an independent label set up by St Etienne, would be on here simply of the strength of being a Shampoo song from the mid 90s even before the greatest chorus of all time kicks in ("When we get you outside/your fucking dead" - who can't appreciate that?). Chanted over and over again like a spell, it was no surprise that the film clip featured a shot of a Barbie doll with a firework up it's arse. In fact, in a wonderful piece of lineage, in the 1960s, on the (actually fantastic) song "Nobody Taught Me" by Barbie and Ken, Barbie sings of the virtue of learning how to "sew and cook". It's unlikely anyone dared try and teach Shampoo the same girly virtues. There is not a single second of "Bouffant Headbutt" that isn't absolute perfection, as guitars chime, vocals chant, and the seconds tick by until some unfortunate baby girl or bastard male gets a "platform in the face".

And the world seems a better place in the cab home. They should have statues built to them...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #39 - Since Yesterday by Strawberry Switchblade

2008-01-05T00:48:00.000-08:00

Alyson: In the sense that pop and pop bands are often fleeting and tuneful reflections of their time (and sometimes, of the technology in the production studio) it's a terrible shame that an endless treasure trove of fascinating stories are never printed or recorded. After all, how many times can you hear about the production of George Martin or the Beatles going to India until the end of time? The interband rivalrys and financial problems and diva like demands of the average two or three hit pop band make for a far more interesting read, but the stories are lost to time and fashion.

Strawberry Switchblade. It's a band that more than any other I will write about, it's Strawberry Switchblade who are the most difficult to explain. The Blade were scottish Punks Jill and Rose, who dressed in a unique and individual style of slashed wedding dresses, eyeliner and ribbon who defied anyone to ridicule them, but at the same time success, crowds and fame scared them (and inflamed the agoraphobia of Jill). A band who could be pop, funk, punk, indie, gothic and folk within one song. An intelligent, self contained band with their own world, but who's own self contained world would end up being their demise once personal relationships died. A band firmly (especially in the case of Rose) committed to the punk ethic (one report said Rose was officially the most committed punk in Glasgow) but who's sole proper hit had an unbelievably beautiful lightness of touch. A band who grew up in a scene of fanzines and rare singles, but who's appearance on Top Of The Tops saw them wreathed in smiles and joy. And a band who are only remembered for marginal success, but who's appearance on the cover of Smash Hits relegated the magazines coverage of the studio recording of the Live Aid single to a marginal mention at the bottom of the page. A band with two disparate personalities, one dark, hard and tough, one soft, shy and vulnerable. And that's just one casual paragraph, there was a lot more besides. Amazing how a band with one "hit", can be infinitely more interesting than Westlife with 200.

Since Yesterday, the "hit", came out in 1985, but it isn't drenched in anything production wise that screams 1980s. There are no overbearing synth drums, no dated production, nothing that would date the song or cheapen the melody with fancy of the day tricks. Instead, the production is beautiful, simple, strange and fragile. The song is defiant but timid, nervous but strong, happy and sad, all within one heartstoppingly wonderful package. The X factor is the girls bittersweet vocal chemistry, as they harmonise wonderfully well, around the subtly strange electro pop backing track. It's both hauntingly beautiful and sparse and wonderfully upbeat at the same time. It's absolutely and totally perfect and hasn't dated a day in 22 years.

The thing is, with The Blade, their one hit was the equal of about 20 of a vastly inferior band, and their story is a proud and fascinating one to tell. However, woe betide anyone seeking to remix it....

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #38 - Cartoon Heroes by Aqua

2008-01-04T22:30:00.000-08:00

Claire: A desperate and tedious rock critic once, in dismissing the Irish band Ash, claimed the reason he didn't like them was because "bands are forever frozen at the first moment we see them" and when he first saw them, he didn't like them. Of course, this tiresome analogy doesn't apply to darlings of the indie set, such as Bob Dylan, who are allowed to evolve into whatever shapes they feel like, and be called "daring" even if all they've done is twiddle a knob on the guitar pedal. Pop acts seeking to evolve face a much harder time. They know the time in the spotlight is necessarily and generally short, but they have to cling onto the notion that just maybe they might be one of the survivors, that evolution might just see them through and avoid the chicken and scampi in a basket re-union tours of the cabaret circuit.

Aqua, of course, were we to freeze them at the first moment we saw them (in the Western markets - they had been around since 1989 in one way or another in mainland Europe), might have seemed a strange novelty, "Barbie Girl" ostensibly a colourful curio, a song that in 2008 would be a smash hit ringtone. People sneered, they had the critical acclaim of the Crazy Frog (and what was WITH the bald guy?). However, Aqua were far more angular and awkward to label than a dismissive listen might seem (the last time I saw them perform was at Eurovision where Lene delivered a positively ROCK performance full of demented, insane levels of energy), so the rumours started. Was Dr Jones about drugs? Was Lollipop about oral sex? Was future list induction Barbie Girl about sexual submission or stalking? No one seemed to mind as long as the tunes were not only silly and fun, but ridiculously entertaining, but there was always a feeling that just maybe, this band had more to say that anyone might care to admit.

Cartoon Heroes, the lead single off poorly supported second album "Aquarius", is at first glance a song about, well, cartoon heroes, and it's a fantastic tune, sawing off the more overt novelty edges of even the best songs on their first album like Dr Jones, and creating credibly (as in a good way) perfect pop. However, it's the sheer darkness of the song that gets it straight onto the list. Think about it, who are the Cartoon heroes who are "All dots and lines that speak and say/What we do is what you wish to do"? Aqua. Tired, fried out, not going to take being slagged off anymore Aqua. And who do you think "Superman, from never-neverland" is? Why, that would be Aquas producers, pushing them for more novelty hits. This is the sound of pop band rebellion, every line straining with exhaustion and complaint and, yes, angst. In true ABBA style, the second albums recording was made difficult by poor personal relationships and break ups, and the result is pissed off pop. This is one of the darkest, most subersive tunes ever recorded, it's a darkly sarcastic classic. And of course, in true I don't understand the world fahion, it's the best song they ever recorded, and it sold like ice cream in a snow storm, and Aqua collapsed in a mardy huff within 12 months. However, they were a mile away from Barbies party by this point.

So much for first impressions....
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Alyson: I REALLY don't like Dr Jones, oddly, out of all the Aqua tunes, and at first I didn't know why. After all, it's catchy kitschy novelty, just as most of the first album was. I think I took it as a compliment towards Aqua after a while, once people started slagging them off, I at least knew not "all the songs sounded the same", every song had a different sense to it. And is Barbie Girl still not the most censor baiting innocently played #1 novelty hit of all time? That takes skill and craft.

It took me a while to get Cartoon Heroes (I preferred the perhaps under-appreciated and unknown Roses Are Red) but I'm to this day amazed at the sheer pissed off undertones of not just the song but the clip. There's not a smile to be found in the whole clip, made more awkward by the cutesy cartoon aliens bouncing around in it. It's an implosion, but a tuneful one at that. It's like biting into the nose of a Bubble O Bill and swallowing a razor blade.

It's absolute black magic...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #37 - 10,000 Nights of Thunder by Alphabeat

2008-01-04T10:47:00.000-08:00

Jessica: My first contribution to this chart is by a band who I discovered almost exactly a year ago. It was one of those experiences where I knew instantly that this band were soon to become one of my absolute favourites. At the time they'd only released Fascination, which is an almightily ace song itself, but the follow-up was even better. 10,000 Nights of Thunder is a song which proves that to make magnificent pop music you do not need a hi-tech studio or a world-renowned producer. A bunch of ordinary (yet extraordinarily jolly) young Danes can make a song like this simply with a good ear for poptasticness and the enthusiasm and energy which makes their music completely infectious.

Alphabeat has 6 members, including a male and a female singer, and these two are both taking the lead on 10,000 Nights of Thunder. The sentiment in the song is lovely: "I was not looking for arty farty love, I wanted someone to love completely". They also seem to slip in a reference to The Safety Dance! It is impossible to listen to this song without smiling ridiculously, and how can you not sing along to those dododos and whoahohohs? This is pure pop magic exactly how it should sound in any era.

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Alyson: It's a different era to my childhood, spoon fed down the throat by chart shows and radio programmes. Anyone with a computer and some foresight (like the lovely Jessica) can hunt out amazing, joyous pop and bring it to the masses. At a time when the charts are full of awful sub tunes, ballads and Eagles albums, the joys of the Internet open up a fantastic world of possibilites.

Alphabeat, of course, are wonderful, shining and radiating within a joyous and magical pop blur of happiness, and the best thing about it is the sheer pulsating almost casually generated energy that makes the song throb wonderfully. Another band who in another age might have snuck through the cracks are now easily accesible to the wider world to make us all smile, laugh and dance. Especially in this week where the Eagles top the album charts. We need all the joy from music we can get....

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #36 - Sick With Love by Robyn Loau

2008-01-03T15:42:00.000-08:00

Shane: Robyn Loau. Her from Girlfriend. The One That Left. The Camera Hog.

Yes, she did leave Girlfriend after getting jack of the bubblegum pop sound that they were known for, leaving the girls to reinvent themselves and eventually break up (some may have said that her leaving was the death knell for the group), but by leaving she was able to open herself up to all manner of crazy new directions. The Siva Pacifica project for one, in which she went from singing about boys, shoes and love to embracing her island heritage in the best way possible (take THAT, Christine Anu). Needless to say, noone was expecting her to do that - nor the next thing that came from her...

Sick With Love is dark, intense, almost nightmarish, adult, overtly sexual. Basically, all the things that Girlfriend weren't (let's pretend that Mel's spectacular rack wasn't there, shall we). The song came so totally out of left field that I seriously think the record buying public was a little scared. Sure, it hit the charts great guns (not a number one, but a pretty respectable showing) based on Robyn's Girlfriend name, but just as quickly disappeared from the airwaves. But not our hearts.

Say what you want about the lovely Miss Loau and Sick With Love, but we did get a lot of now standard musical tricks from the effort. From the bombastic (some would say overly self-important) strings that announce the arrival of something new for the heady days of 97, through to the vocodering/echo layering of the voice, the dancing in a grungy room filled ankle deep with a myseteous liquid, to the overall
emo-ness of the lyrics - Sick With Love popularised almost everything that we now hate about the charts. It was different then, I swear - hey, at least THIS song is still good.

It's not, nor was it ever, a dancefloor filler. It was designed to show that Robyn was now an adult, and to harken her maturation as a performer. This, it did with aplomb. And the song, we all know is a keeper.
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Claire: There's a telling story about the early days of Girlfriend (Australia's greatest ever girl band) in which Robyn Loau, the lead singer, was carpeted for using the word "tits" in an interview. At the risk of stating the obvious, there was no use of that word in Girlfriend because there was no sex in Girlfriend world. Robyn was a girl who had experienced racism and "real life" and who was a born cynic, so shoehorning her into a fun hat and jacket combo was never going to be her fullest musical expression, no matter how well crafted the tunes were. Unlike "the talented one Mel C", the talented one Robyn, had, you know, talent.

Robyn (crucially never bagging out Girlfriend but being IN Girlfriend and not getting paid, a big difference) may have seemed to the untrained eye to be another pop sell out, someone tediously whingeing about her back catalogue, Damon Albarn style, before unveiling her "real music", but the process of her re-invention never quite betrayed her pure pop roots. The songs from lost classic album "Malaria" (never released due to, sigh, record company politics) were much blacker and real, nightmarishly so, but they never lapsed in poetry and or tedium and always had a slick ear for a hook. The albums calling card, Sick With Love is one of the finest pop singles of the 90s, dark, awkward, and as much about hate and loathing as Girlfriend were about friendship and cheer. No matter what anyone thinks of the majesty of Girlfriend, they were unlikely to be singing "Every time I'm making love with you/Kind of makes me feel like I hate you" and wandering through sewers in the film clip. But for the frustrations of the unreleased albums, it would still be regarded as the most successful re-invention in Australian musical history, despite the "help" of Triple J to promote her.

However awkward her stance on Girlfriend is, was or ever will be, her ear for a tune remained solid, and she came up with a perfect musical moment. No wonder she hogged the camera...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #35 - Who Do You Love Now by Riva featuring Dannii Minogue

2008-01-01T00:38:00.000-08:00

Claire: Back in 2003 (I think) when Andrew Denton was launching Enough Rope, his tedious intellectual gabfest on Australian TV, he said "It'll never have Dannii Minogue on it", hilariously pointing out the inhertent intellectualism of his interviews with interesting celebrities, and not, of course Ms Minogue, who surely had nothing to say. What a great juxtaposition that was. Without any apparent irony, Denton sat down not six weeks later to talk with that endlessly fascinating and urbane celebrity...um...Heath Ledger. He said John Howard "sucks". Boy, that sure showed us Dannii Minogue fans. Put us right in our place.

We are in our friendship group unashamed fans of Dannii Minogue without the need for a cheeky ironic wink. In fact, we prefer her to Kylie as a person. One of the things a lot of people miss with Dannii, especially in regards to her music career, is that she operates within her own dance pop genre, where she can be counted on to deliver strident dance floor anthems and memorable tunes, without the distractions of tedious genre staddling. Kylie's ridiculous forays into credibility have undermined her career, and when she needs a hit, she retreats to a form of dance-pop aimed at her gay fans, and she does it very well, but she forgets what made her successful in the first place after that, and bores everyone again. Dannii is where she is, at the heart of the dance floor, and while she's probably not got an entire album quite right (arguably), she's released some outstanding disco and dance music singles, that were they not attached to the "lesser" Minogue, would be championed in much trendier magazines. In fact, the need to somehow defend someone for the sins of releasing outstanding dance music with no other aim than to bring pleasure to people seems somehow absurd to begin with.

It's a thesis explored in my new book, but I digress.

Officially Riva featuring Dannii Minogue, and also known as Who Do You Love Now (Stringer) for reasons I never quite found out (something to do with the sample I think or the original instrumental or something), Who Do You Love Now is one of the most outstanding dance pop singles of the decade. Riva, the Dutch production DJs behind the song, provide it's thumping and subtle beats, but it's Dannii's song obviously - some people will tell you that anyone could do the job of interpretation required to be the vocalist in a dance pop song is incredibly easy but in the wrong hands the songs attitude can fail miserably. Dannii delivers a swaggering vocal, and the whole song is so deceptively simple, it's easy to dismiss the care and craft required to make the song as loud and proud as it is. It's an under-rated skill to be a dance pop vocalist (see also, Tina Cousins) and not overplay your hand and make the song cheesy. And this song never lapses for a single second into cheese - it's wonderful dance music from start to finish, even on the longer remixes. A sheer triumph.

Oh, but Heath Ledger, he's got lots to say....honestly...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #34 - Something Spooky by Atomic Kitten

2007-12-31T18:53:00.000-08:00

Alyson: When we did this list, or at least, came up with the idea behind it, there were only 5 (now 6) artists we banned outright. We accepted at some point we were going to be promoting songs by Artists we didn't really like overall. Just wait until Claire has to deal with ABBA. It was important that this list just didn't end up being "Alyson and Claire's favourite songs" - if a song was great, and deserved to be on this list, it should be on here, regardless of a) artist or b) our own prejudices. Yes, ABBA will be here at some point, probably Umbrella, and we can accept that. It's the 1001 Greatest Pop songs of all time, and songs that are important to a pop year will be included, not just songs we like, it's important to make that really clear. We don't take this responsibility lightly.

Ricki Lee, obviously though, is banned.

Anyway - Atomic Kitten. Not one of my favourite bands, and the people within the band don't do a lot for me, as people. Probably unfair in some ways to say not one of my favourite bands, since my exposure to them is pretty much restricted to "Whole Again", "The Tide Is High" and the worst song I heard in many years "Ladies Night" (slappers unite!). More a band I don't think about a lot. Towards the end of their run, they approached 100% perfection simply by uniting rock AND pop critics against them. By and large, they started off OK, the first album isn't too bad, and then kind of went downhill from there. This is a positive list though, so I will admit a certain fondness for debut single "Right Now", if only for a) the kitten logo they were trying to get up (like the Napster logo without a face) and b) the demented frenetic energy of the film clip, bobbling around awkwardly on mad camera angles with no budget spent on stylists. Maybe that's the problem, stylists turning them into a band for slappers. I digress.

However, tucked away on the B side to Right Now, you'll be possibly surprised to know, is a slice of almost 1960s bubblegum heaven. In fact, change the vocalists and drop the modern production a touch, and it could slip easily onto the debut albums of The Banana Splits or Josie and the Pussycats. It sounds wonderfully like something that play over the antics of Josie or Shaggy running around a haunted house chasing a ghost and then going through a door and realising the ghost is chasing them. Entitled "Something Spooky" (and the theme song to something called Belfry Witches, some kids show or another), it's brilliantly addictive pop. I mean, it starts with 10 chants (not sung, chants, it's important) of the word "hey". How bubblegum is that? And wonderfully, it's lyrically about absolutely nothing meaningful, being about witches out on the prowl, "burning up their broomsticks til the morning sun" and speaking spells. The hooked and looped chants make the song, and the wonderfully silly spoken word bit "Oh no! Look out! Ahhhhh!" could come straight from the best work of Kasenetz and Katz. And believe me, if you can't see the line "hubble bubble double trouble" as fantastically bubblegum, I can't explain it to. The whole song bubbles and fizzes with so much good natured tuneful silliness without ever slipping into cynical parody, it's magical, it's wonderfully pop and it's a shame Atomic Kitten didn't continue down this particular musical path.

Is it cool or hip? Absolutely not. It is screamingly good bubblegum pop? Oh god yes. Now, about your wardrobe...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #33 - Sweet Temptation by Lillix

2007-12-31T17:59:00.000-08:00

Claire: One thing we haven't neccesarily talked about in these entries is what makes a great popstar, rather than what makes a great pop song. The singer of the song is vitally important. In lesser hands, great songs don't sound so mighty. Looks are obviously important, but Lulu was a great popstar while rocking a dodgy mid 60s Glaswegian housewifer perm, and ultimately, it's the attitude that maketh the true pop star,. The best pop songs in the post Avril era seem to involve a snarling defiance and a distinct lack of simpering. It's important that even on this list, we recognise many a song can be enhanced by a guitar or a drumbeat, but we're talking in a different way. There can be no solo frettery wanking solos in pop, the guitars can, if you wish, be loud and crunchy, but they must embed into the song, rather than be the be all and end all. And perhaps most of all, the chorus has to soar. In pop, most things come down to the chorus, that's where the producer and the band will earn their money. A pop song with a limp chorus can barely qualify as a Pop song. A producer will mess around with the chorus at risk to their own risk.

All this and the mysterious X Factor will decide the fate of the great pop song.

Canadian girlband Lillix, of course, had so many of these qualities - looks, attitudes, fuck off choruses, attitude, instruments that didn't get in the way of the tunes - that it's immensely frustrating that a rotating line up (from the Sweet Temptation release in 2006, already they have turned over 4 members in the struggle to keep the band going) and god awful label distribution on Maverick Records (in it's dying days) that saw the album "Inside The Hollow" fail to see the light of day anywhere other than Japan and bits of Canada. They emphatically muscled up their sound (in a good way) from their still excellent debut album "Falling Uphill", which was more teen pop. They should have ruled the world, but it was not to be. People though bought James Blunt, HE didn't have label problems...sigh...

Sweet Temptation is the greatest single you never heard. Above all else, it has the greatest chorus of it's year, a swelling, chanting be yourself and stuff the world chorus, magificently bouncing off the more gently building verses. The guitars and drums in the song enhance the song, rather than overwhelm it. It's brilliantly post Avril pop, loud and proud, with a heart stopping bit where the song stops and re-builds to the finish (complete with counting bits, one of the best things a pop song can have). It tips it's hat to the Go Go-s and The Bangles, and it's perfect radio pop, tuneful enough to get on a playlist, but lyrically subversive enough to stand out as a piece of brilliance amid the fluff and "meaning" of modern pop. This is absolute genius of the highest order, and it gets better the louder you play it. Which is ALWAYS a good sign.

It should have been #1 all over the world, but that's pop for you. No justice....
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Alyson: It's only quite recently I've got into this song, I don't know why I missed it at the time, I liked it, but it's only recently crossed onto a full blown "must play". It was certainly loud enough for me to enjoy. Maybe the problem was that I was a bit disappointed they changed the original chorus of "fuck no" to "follow", and held it against them. More fool me. It still sounds a lot like "fuck no", so you can just pretend...

I must admit, I find the track used to best effect on a loud and packed dancefloor, if we can ever get it played. It's sheer volume alone could knock over a field of cows if it gets played properly. And they scream attitude, pouting and glaring their way through the simple but effective video clip. This is, as we have said, perfect Avril generation pop. Maybe Ms Lavigne, if she is struggling for inspiration next album....

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #32 - Cruel Summer by Bananarama

2007-12-31T14:51:00.001-08:00

Alyson: Claire is right, we probably need to cut the explanations and the crusading down a bit, if for no other reason that we hope you know and realise how silly and snobby "rock" journalism is. In the desire to trip over themselves to annoint some scruffy indie herberts as the saviours of music, they will make themselves look like the knowledge by baiting the pop bands of the day. Then, later, they'll out themselves as having a "guilty pleasure" - the idea seems ridiculous, why is it guilty to find liking heart stoppingly brilliant pop as something to be ashamed of? (Although tragically, they got to Siobhan, now 18 years into a tragic solo career of attempting goth keeping it real, but I digress.) I'll stop before I bring up that martian analogy again...

Bananarama (the conjunction of The Banana Splits and the Roxy Music track "Pyjamarama, how bubblegum is that partnership?) for instance got the usual tedious slagging throughout the 80s for having the temerity to be happy and make great pop, while rock journalists were sobbing into their Smiths CDs. Pop puppets they sneered. Laughable, we sneered back from the pop side of the fence. After all, Bananarama were brought up through punk rock fandom, jumping on stage at random moments of punk gigs to dance and steal the microphone, all the while living above the rehearsal space of a couple of Sex Pistols (who weren't contrived of course, oh nooooo). And on the set of the Cruel Summer video, when the cameraman was focusing too much on Siobhan, they ominously sorted it out "Bananarama style" - ie. they beat the crap out of him. And girl power? Few girl bands have had as genuine a right to the phrase. They practically in this era invented the term, using their videos to teach wayward men a lesson. Even in prime era SAW, when they dropped down a gear on the mardy meter circa WOW, they were still the ones in control, turning into lovers not fighters.

The idea that Siobhan, Keren and Sara were anyone puppets is ludicrous.

Cruel Summer, from 1983, is immense. It swaggers with Thatcherite era cynicism, girls out there partying with one eye open, waiting for the inevitable betrayal from bastard men. It's empowered, a song for the broken hearted who refuse to cry into their shandies, who still get up the next day and fight (literally in the case of the Nanas) on. It's wonderfully sarcastic in a typical British way (and in a way Ace Of Base never quite got on their cover) - it might be bouncy, but there's a darkness behind the cheer, the kind of minds that think about tomorrows hangover while drinking today. It's anything but innocent, despite the sweetest of bubblegum new wave pop tunes. It's both a song for the party, and the party comedown. All in the space of 3 epic minutes. Absolutely perfect.

But hey, they were really pop puppets, honest...bring on the martians....
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Claire: This is my favourite Bananarama song, and one of my favourite ever songs, and it changed my life, it's my first musical memory, the be-fringed trio swaggering round the streets of New York making life miserable for the bumbling Dukes Of Hazzard duo in the squad car trying to make them go back to work at the petrol station. I would consider myself almost the worlds biggest Siobhan Fahey fan, right up until that band I won't mention broke the spell. Still, they couldn't break the wonderment I still feel for Cruel Summer.

Bananarama don't ever get the credit they deserve. They had three distinct spells - the initial punkpop of the early years, the mid 80s strident period where they dominated everything with their wonderful bubblegum phrasing, and the SAW years where they were wise enough to drop down a level and simply become wonderfully pop. And in 2005, Sara and Keren made the hypnotically wonderful Drama, of which more later, refusing to simply fade away and become a cover act and putting thought and care into their music. And yet, you never see the Nanas on so called "great songs" list. Scruffy indie herberts, you pack as much darkness and beauty into your song as Cruel Summer has, and we'll talk about your music, K?

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #31 - You Only Live Twice by Nancy Sinatra

2007-12-31T01:42:00.000-08:00

Claire: We're conscious of repeating ourselves in this list, but to me, doing this list seems quite bizarre. The luscious nature of pop and it's power to heal, lift and empower should surely on any rational planet be celebrated, but instead, the power of the critical list seems to belong to the latest bunch of scruffy indie misfits babbling on, just because they can strum the F chord on a guitar. It's a strange and contrary world that thinks because a song has a joyous coda to it, it's cheap and meaningless. However, pop is very easy to get wrong, and people under-estimate the difficulty to be convincing at interpreting a pop song, as though anyone could do it. Believe us, not everyone can. That we need to point out the strength of these songs to the Toby Cresswells of this world feels like I'm turning into a rallying girl, who is saying the obvious.

Nancy Sinatra, it's fair to say, is a massive personal hero of mine. I think of her as the single most under-appreciated artist of the 1960s. She shone with star quality, and was an emphatically superb interpreter of a song, particularly once Lee Hazlewood instructed her to get nasty and "bite the words". To quote the old Smash Hits, her best of CD contains no duff tracks at all. However, because she was sublimely beautiful and, gasp, didn't write her own songs, history doesn't afford her the respect she deserves, and all she is remembered for is her is her duet with her Dad and the kitschy "These Boots...", rather than the 43 other singles she released on Reprise, which cover all the entire gamut of human emotions. And believe me, if you don't appreciate Nancy as a magical singer, have a listen to someone attempting covering her songs. Awful isn't it? I never forgave Coldplay...

You Only Live Twice (the Bond theme from the film of the same name, when having a Bond theme meant something) incidentally, is almost a mash up, since the words and vocals are pretty much cobbled together from a tape from a shambolic session where Nancy struggled to get her performance in order. However, the vulnerability and nerves on the vocal add to the lush, romantic theme of the song. Less aggressive than previous Bond themes, You Only Live Twice, tinged with a film appropriate Oriental feel, is laid back perfect pop, luscious and seductive. And of course, it's incumbent to mention THOSE John Barry strings, without which the songs romantic feeling wouldn't build anywhere near as well. This is heart stoppingly wonderful stuff, and even 40 years on, not a single second is wasted on the whole track.

It's perfect, absolutely perfect, but I suspect you knew that. However, if you prefer wordy indie poetry...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #30 - Riding The Rocket (少年ナイフ) by Shonen Knife

2007-12-29T23:26:00.000-08:00

Alyson: It's fair to say when I think of word pop, the first word that comes to mind is always "bubblegum", so most of my entries tend to first and foremost think of those songs recorded in a production line in the 1960s and 70s, sung by cartoon bands who's real singers were pressed for time session vocalists, but whose songs were lovingly crafted to infect your brain with a fantastic glittery sugary hook. Tiresomely, these songs get overlooked in favour of the pressings of Bob sodding Dylan when the 60s are reviewed, but they were frothy, fun and in some cases, far less disposable and a lot more immediate than the so called chroniclers of the times like "The Band". Surely The Banana Splits album has more urgency and vitality than anything The Band ever did? If you told aliens that people bought albums by The Band and Tra La La peaked at 93 in the charts, they'd blow up the planet instantly.

Having recently got into "J-Pop" (Japanese pop reduced to short hand) through the soon to be inducted Puffy and Wink, the sheer vitality of the best pressings (and believe me, I do love J Pop, I'm not Jane Gazzo in a Banana Chips T-shirt flirting with me no rikey racism by mocking the funny vocals) is akin to peak era Bubblegum pop, as though no traces of wordiness or sodding Dylan have managed to sneak through. Mind, it is a task to precisely untangle the complexities of exactly what is J-Pop and what isn't. Sometimes Puffy associate themselves and sometimes they don't. To casually lump it all together is a dis-service. All that anyone need know is at heart, the best Japanese pop could come straight from a Banana Splits album.

Prime Japanese band Shonen Knife, for instance, you could write entire paragraphs debating whether they were punk or pop (they write songs with nursery rhyme chants, but have at least some punk following), credible or incredulous, clever or nonsensical. Truthfully, they deserve at least one induction on account of the fact they are fantastic fun. "Riding The Rocket" from the 1992 album Pretty Little Baka Guy, notionally about a trip to space, but with an infectious bubblegum groove and a tremendous energy, is to me to very epitome of joy, from a year when everyone else was cutting their musical wrists. The Knife and Girlfriend kept me sane in a tough year. The girls have a tremendous grasp of fun, and who couldn't love a song dedicated to a space walk dance party? And in the best traditions of bubblegum, lyrically it's absolutely meaningless. Did you know they eat aspargus in space? You will if you listen to this song! There's an intuitive grasp of pop throbbing through this song, regardless of what labels you try and put on it.

It's the sweetest of sugary treats, it's not for everyone, it'd drive you nuts on repeat play, but it has a magical centre to it that surely can melt the most cynical heart. Just like they used to make in the good old days...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #29 - All The Things She Said by TATU

2007-12-29T20:15:00.000-08:00

Claire: It's fair to say that the world, like Pop, needs controversy. Without it, all bands would be like Westlife, Il Divo, or worse, Boyzone. Tedious, safe and pre planned and market researched down to the nth degree, even to the second they got off the stool and everyone would buy "Motown cover" albums and sound like Jane Gazzo. It's not a world for me, and it's not a world for you either.

TATU's world was always morally dubious and a world away from such boring concerns - lesbianism for profit and faux lesbian at that and all that stuff that kept the Daily Telegraph letters page churning on, but it was fascinating and interesting, the kind of things you can't imagine Western Culture will produce in the current boring climate (how do people make it through High School Musical? Surely that boys neutered?). If nothing else, TATU's brief and emphatic period as the most talked about band on the planet was something different, it was sleazy and it was grimy, but it was also an important nod to pops never ending history of svengalis and masterminds seeking to stir up controversy for a fast buck.

Actually, it wasn't anything to do with the controversy (after all, All About Us had a bloody murder, and no one remembers that video) as to why All The Things She Said was a massive hit (it helped, but it's not why it topped the charts, and the outrage seemed weary at first, more justified later at some of the stunts from the dying days). It was to do with the fact this is one of the best songs, never mind debut singles, of all time. It's a nervous breakdown on record, insane and urgent, confused and erratic, chaotic melodrama packed into 3 and a half minutes, Trevor Horns kitchen sink production and background countdown ticking clock meeting the girls panicked, wailing and imperfectly translated vocals (although it's impact was still great on the original Russian track, translated as "I've Lost My Mind"). It could have been about two girls running away from summer camp and it would have been a great song, but it works in context of the lesbian gimmick, infusing it with a desperation and believability. The video clip was designed to court controversy and nothing more, but without the great song, it would have slumped through the cracks.

Of course, it couldn't last, that's the trouble with the gimmick running out of steam and later sleazy stunts, but this song is still a perfect song for anyone in love and driven insane by it. Whether with boy, girl or band-mate...

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Alyson: It eventually got really tacky in the TATU world, once the e-mails started to come out advertising that they wanted 14 year old girls in underpants to line up on a bridge. But that was more to do with Ivan than TATU, once he got mixed up as to what the success of TATU was about. The controversy was always, arguably, secondary to song quality once All The Things She Said was dropped on the public. And for the questions of moral bankruptcy, they weren't any worse on that charge than The Pussycat Dolls, the most morally bankrupt band of this decade.

After all, commercial radio, not the most open minded forum, found a place for this song on heavy rotation. It is only arguable though, since it owed a lot to old fashioned publicity stunts, tabloid stirring and a deliberately provocative video clip. That they got away with it is down to the heart stopping brilliance of the song, particularly the time clock ticking down, and it's hard not to love the sheer brass neck of everyone involved. And yes, it was a much, much better time than now, when people are buying High School Musical...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #28 - Loves Loves To Love Love by Lulu

2007-12-28T23:03:00.000-08:00

Alyson: Whoever invented the nostalgia industry in music (whether it was Bob sodding Dylan or the sodding Beatles, it's always one of those two) unwittingly did a lot of artists a great dis-service. Just as The Kinks (a band you won't be seeing on this list) had a back catalogue ground down by Damon Albarn to Waterloo Sunset only, so several quite important and wonderful pop artists have their catalogue ground down that single what charted quite well, and that one what didn't, when their back catalogue with a little patience can be revealed as stunning, inventive and magical. There's a fascinating world of lost pop classics out there from the 60s and 70s that lie somewhere between "I'm a nerdy record collector" or "I'm a Bob Dylan fan, here's his vinyl". A lot of amazing songs that got to 20-30 in the charts are out there, waiting for a home, a lot of artists that could do with a severe re-assessment.

Take Lulu for instance. In our little musical world, we like to give everyone a fair chance, and after "To Sir With Love" was on I-dull a few years ago, I went and bought "The Best Of Lulu" for about a buck, and it was a revelation. Her back catalogue before Boom Bang A Bang, her German singles, her stunning interpretation of various cover songs (Mr Bojangles is stunning), her work with Take That, her magical phrasing and melisma on "To Sir With Love" (still one of the best love songs of all time), a 4 decade career of wonderful songs, and people still want "Shout" and remember her as the funny cameoer in Ab Fab. It's a shame, maybe she's happy that way, you never know. Let this post, at least slightly, redress the balance.

The 1967 single "Love Loves To Love Love" didn't make the top 30, in spite of being a prime glam rock stomper before it's time. It clocks in at roughly two minutes long, the lyrics are fantastically tongue twisting (just try saying Love Loves To Love Love 8 times in a minute never mind singing it live) and sung by one of the most under-rated vocalists of her time, and it has a beating glittery heart of pure wonderment and magic. Perhaps the best thing about it is every time it's on the IPOD, you can hear a new magical element to it, whether it's the fantastic throbbing backing guitar, or a new part of the lyrical conceit (blue is hung up on red? Brilliant) or the full magic of the bongo breakdown in the middle. And then, it's over, like a cool guest a party who comes only for a flying visit and steals your heart.

I consider this one of the best singles of the 1960s, and an absolutely essential part of any pop IPOD. But still, Boom Bang A Bang is available from your local DJ...

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Claire: I really wasn't sure about this one, it's Alysons baby this entry, since I prefer and might one day post about "Can't Hear You No More", one of my favourite songs of the 60s, which is almost Lulu goes Gospel in it's breathtaking strutting wonderful chorus, but I certainly support any appreciation for the under-rated works of Lulu that are much better than "Shout" and "Boom Bang A Bang". Above all she's endlessly fascinating, not just musically, but with the life she's lead. Sometimes she's cool, sometimes she isn't, but it's always interesting, and you can't say that about "the new Lulu", er, Sheena Easton.

Above all else, Lulu is massive fun to listen to, her songs are unabashed, noisy and vigorous, especially in her late 60s pomp. Love Loves To Love Love is about my third favourite Lulu song, it's probably a little more technically clever than "Can't Hear You No More" (which has a great doomsday reference), so I knock it down a bit, but it is fantastic fun and wonderfully daft (in a good way) like a lot of great, don't worry about the beats get the tune in late 60s songs were. And really, get her Greatest Hits. You'll be surprised. Honest.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #27 - Freak Like Me by The Sugababes

2007-12-28T20:48:00.000-08:00

Claire: The mash up era, the idea that it was commercially viable to make singles and albums by sticking the tune of one song over the words of another, ended up being about as meaningful and long lasting as the new wave of the new wave or electroclash, any other label the NME staff wanted to throw together during their lunch break. In truth, it was nothing new, but it was briefly incredibly hip, coming out of the nightclub and into the charts once "A Stroke Of Genieous" allowed indie dolts to play a Christina Aguilera song guilt free. Even commercial radio DJs in Australia, rusted onto their playlist, were given leeway to bolt the latest Nirvana music over Eminem rapping MP3 downloaded from the hip technology of Napster. Imagine how outrageous they must have felt.

It's probably strange then that the most viable and well constructed song of the era only got to #44 in the charts in Australia, despite a long standing reputation surrounding the track as the hottest mashup in UK nightclubs. A mash up titled "We Don't Give a Damn About Our Friends" (the vocals belonging to Adina Howard and her 1995 single "Freak Like Me" and the music most notably from Gary Numan, with some Bootsy Collins (who further complicating the issue, had one of his songs, "I'd Rather Be With You", lyrically interpreted by Howard for the chorus ), Sly and The Family Stone and Frogger sound effects thrown in), created by producer Richard X under the alias Girls On Top had circulated around the hip spots of London for a while, but when it came to the commercial release, Howard, having being ripped off financially before in her music career, turned down the release of her original vocals.

So it fell to the Sugababes, with the song renamed "Freak Like Me", and with new member Heidi Range, to do the commercial honors. The song essentially sounds cool, fuzzy, grimy and industrial. Above all else, it still sounds edgy, dangerous and most importantly, it came at the end of an era of essentially fine, but carefully constructed and ultimately risk free pop. Freak Like Me leaves the working on show, and blasts out of the speakers. Vocally, the Sugababes interpret sublimely, where as in lesser hands, the glass would fall to the floor (as with the "band" chosen to release A Stroke Of Genieous as a single) and the result would be a mess.

For what little "credibility" matters on this list, this has the best kind of cred. And best of all, it sounds truckloads, a rare example of intelligent pop getting it's proper reward, and it repositioned the Sugababes ans the coolest band around, in the best possible way - without trying. Effortlessly, utterly vital, even now.

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Alyson: So as much as anything, I really did think about what I wanted to say about this track, patently, it had nothing to do with the Sugababes. It's sample tastic, made in a lab, the lyrics come from one song, the music from several different sources. As much as we're not that concerned with cred on this list, I did take a pause before not just writing 20 paragraphs about Richard X, rather than anything about the Sugababes.

However something Pete Waterman said about The Reynolds Girls sticks in my mind, in that once they went out in public and sang, no one felt the slightest conviction or had any belief in them. For a relatively young group to go out in public and interpret a sleazy, grimy song and deliver when they were best known for soulful songwriting credibility, and had lost a member was a massive challenge. And they delivered more than they could have hoped for, barging through the door and becoming impressively vital.

So it has nothing to do with them, but somehow everything to do with them. It's the conversion of a band from out the shadows and into the light. They've probably never been as good since. A modern day classic.

It's back!

2007-12-28T20:42:00.000-08:00

The project that got stalled by intransigence is back! Mostly because we got sick of Pop retrospectives with Beyonce (booo) and the stupid book that inspired this book by Toby Cresswell (1001 songs for sad snobs) got a reprint! Booo! So we're back to keep the list of 1001 greatest pop songs going, this is the list so far!

Betty Boo - Doin' The Doo
Blondie - Rapture
Britney Spears - ...Baby One More Time
Britney Spears - (You Drive Me) Crazy
Dannii Minogue - All I Wanna Do
Deborah Gibson - M.Y.O.B
Girlfriend - Girls Life
Girls Aloud - Biology
Girls Aloud - Sound Of The Underground
Hanson - I Will Come To You
Holly Valance - Ricochets
Kim Wilde - Kids In America
Kylie Minogue - I Should Be So Lucky
Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes - The Block Party
Liz Phair - Why Can't I
Madonna - Into The Groove
Melissa - Read My Lips
Mint Royale featuring Lauren Laverne - Don't Falter
Rachel Stevens - Some Girls
Republica - Ready To Go
Spice Girls - Wannabe
Take That - Never Forget
The Banana Splits/Liz Phair - The Tra La La Song
The Twins - All Mixed Up
The Veronicas - 4Ever
Vanilla Ninja - Club Kung Fu

More to come!

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #26 - Rapture by Blondie

2006-05-02T01:07:00.000-07:00

Claire: In a genre of music where the participants seem openly reluctant in 2006 to actually say they are a pop act, when they clearly are, constructing the correct pop "lineage" is difficult. Still, when we sat down to do this list, everything more or less began with Blondie, the true (not Queen, ugh) pioneers of the video age - you can play Bohemian Rhapsody until your eyes bleed - Debbie Harry is the starting point of everything to come - a beautiful, blonde super cool presence sweeping the Mitchells and Kings and Smiths of "female strum-rock" into the past. A clear triumph of style of substance it would have been, if Blondie were not also a fantastic, post punk band, mixed to sound like triumphant new wave pop. As video clips became more and more important, Harry was the first modern popstar, the pioneer of a visual age where stars could no longer hide in cardigans and tweed, but had to project an image - Madonna, certainly, owes her a massive debt.

Although this list is concerned with hooks, tunes, glamour and beats rather than legacy or "worthiness", there's little question on this list, Rapture is worthy of it's place for so many reasons, not least because of it's sheer, imposing quality. Languid, mid tempo disco beats that float in mid air, wrapping around Harry's sensual vocal, would be more than enough for a place on this list, a massive, beautiful smashing of new wave pop and disco, but there's much, much more. Mid song, Harry starts rapping - the first major white artist, for better or worse, to openly acknowledge hip-hop culture, complete with name checks of some of the major figures of the day. While now a days that's work a day and cliched, it was an exciting moment that gave hip hop exposure in dance and disco clubs that didn't know or care to play it. All of which sounds like the whole thing is the kind of miserable, credibility seeking music we despise, it's nothing of the sort. Rapture is simply a fantastic song, glacially cool, equal parts dance and beautiful dream scape - no song sounds like it, and yet, it's somehow influenced everything and everyone that's followed it - the very definition of amazing, hallucinogenic dreamy pop - there's even a rock guitar, clanging deep in the mix, kicking down yet another wall.

Harry and Blondie rarely appear on "worthy" lists dominated by dolts like U2 and Bob Dylan, but Rapture's genre smashing brilliance, the glamorous uber cool sweeping of Harry onto a more video orientated era, would render it the most influential pop song we could list. That's its equal parts thrilling and poptastic just adds to the thrill. A truly magnificent slice of pop.
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Alyson: I think there's never been a doubt in our head Blondie should be in everyones "best" list, I'd be surprised if even those seeking to thrust a credibility conferring on their band (tool shiner in Pearl Jam holding out a Muddy Waters CD, I'm looking at YOU) would never denied the way Blondie smashed down the walls between punk, pop, and yes, rap. Most influential band of all time? Perhaps, certainly of the modern era, certianly one of the coolest.

For Rapture, significance is secondary to excitement - an orgasm on record to begin with, an exciting musical development in the middle, post coital and dreamy aftewards. Sexy, sensual, but nightmarish and gritty, it's 4 perfect parts of songs mixed together into one - as Claire said, nothing sounds like it, and somehow, everything sounds like it, or at least it's got a copy of it. I'm sure we could talk about the other members of Blondie and musical influences, and producers - but it's Harry at the heart of the Pop beast, a musical magpie clever enough to sweep across the styles with her vocals, but equally clever and sophisticated enough to stay grounded enough to remember to pack a hell of a hook into her music. Not in any way ashamed of being pop, but clever enough to begin the twisting of it's boundaries that some are smart enough to use, and some are dumb enough to claim "isn't pop" - it's their detriment that they will never be fit to walk in front of her graffiti.

An epic in other words.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #25 - 4ever by The Veronicas

2006-02-12T01:05:00.000-08:00

Claire: I often wonder if my current Sissyphus attitude to music (every time I push the rock back up the hill, it seems another James Blunt or Smashing Pumpkins “hit” depresses me and so I start again, trying to push the rock back up the hill and feel positive about music again) is justified. I mean, obviously a world with James Blunt, Jack Johnson, Pete Murray AND Bernard Fanning isn’t one to be happy about, but maybe I’m just jaded from having lived through three distinct golden era’s in Pop music history. However, in recent times, only one act has provided me with a consistent child like excitement. The kind of child like excitement that makes you jump and move with child like glee, and that act, remarkably, are a couple of on the surface Shazzas from the Gold Coast who like wannabe Avril clones on first glance. In fact, appearances made me initially sceptical, but now, I am fully fledged on the bandwagon of The Veronicas. On this list, at this time, this is included as the sound of pop, now.

The Vs, Jess and Lisa, fall into the post Avril era of pop, where the attitude is aggressive and the thrills somewhat spikier. It’s the same aggressive adjustment made by the post World Idol Kelly Clarkson, a louder headrush, the tune thumping louder in the speakers. Luckily, in the case of the Vs, such an attitude doesn’t appear (yet) to have been manufactured – they are what they say they are, excitable and unpredictable girls caught up in the thrills of making great pop. They love doing it, and they work hard at it. Luckily for the Vs, such talent has had it’s own reward with song writing sessions with Billy Steinberg (of Like a Virgin and True Colors fame) and Max Martin (you KNOW who he is). During the sessions with Steinberg, a little song called “All About Us” emerged which was given to TATU, and during the sessions with Sir Max, the adrenalin charged sound of now, 4ever, emerged. Truthfully, if it wasn’t for the Vs and this collaboration, I would almost have totally given up on mainstream music. The Vs give me hope that somehow, someone might yet emerge out of her torpor that is modern music, and provide us all with some genuine pop thrills at the higher end of the chart. Well, we can only pray.

4ever simply doesn’t stop for it’s entire running time. Guitars are crunching, drums are bashing, and Vs and friends are running wild. The aggression in the song is entirely channelled into running amok and having a good time, and not a single second of the song is wasted, packing as much high energy girl pop into the mix as is possible. To proudly state in one breath “Let me take you on the ride of your life!” then dismiss it with a coolly Australian “Yeah, that’s what I said, alright!” is an oddly Australian lyric, at least, the old fashioned non whinging Australia, of laid back cool and charm. Max no doubt supplies enough of a rock edge to JUST sneak past the critics, but let’s face it, this is nothing but bubblegum, a deliriously thrilling ride from go to whoa, just like their bubblegum predecessors who they took their name from, The Archies.

As much as Crazy Chick was my favourite song of 2005, the combination of the fact that this music comes from MY country (and it’s rare I can say THAT proudly) and really came out of nowhere, out of no “scene” or Triple J sponsored hypeathon, and has sold, at least gives me some hope. It was the most exciting song I’ve heard in a long time, and for that reason, it should go straight on this list. Will it last? Will it date? Sometimes, those concerns are worthless. In the here and now, thank God for The Vs. They are keeping me sane.
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Alyson: I must admit, from first listen, I was more excited by the Vs potential than any other Australian pop group in a long, long, long time. Not that that would be hard of course, given our long drought in doing anything poptastic. The Vs are such an exciting prospect, they seem totally incongruous for the year 2006, a time characterised by the bland leading the bland. I have an odd feeling they might be a starting point for something, that spiky pop thrills might be refined and reproduced by similar bands, which would be encouraging, if record companies stopped searching for the next pub rocker with a guitar and looked for glamour. Still, even if this flops in America, at least it’s spawned “4ever”.

I agree with Claire in that’s a very childlike thrill. There’s other Vs songs which are a bit more deep and meaningful, but similar to Republicas Ready To Go, this is a full on crash into the heart of the nightlife, into the heart of wide eyed thrills. I always like to see what a song sounds like at full volume, and the Vs pass that test easily. Unlike so much modern music which filters in the back of coffee shops, the Vs are far more excitable and difficult to pigeon hole. We still don’t know a lot about them on a personal level, but we do they’ve had this crazy idea to make loud, enjoyable music you can crank up, dance to and run around mad to and more importantly, enjoy. Amazing idea, I hope it catches on, crazy as it sounds…

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #24 - Ready To Go by Republica

2006-02-08T17:42:00.000-08:00

Alyson: Whisper it gently if it helps, but that whole Britpop thing, is was kind of rubbish wasn't it? I mean, it left behind, what Alright, Common People and some decent Oasis tunes - but nothing else, and even those songs aren't exactly being whipped out over and over again for people to enjoy. It's no surprise to me Pop was back in the ascendancy by the end of 1996 - let's face it, people felt good, and looked good, and wanted to feel JOYOUS, and what was there to soundtrack it - Cast? Ocean Colour Scene? Sleeper? Come ON...

Besides, it was hardly POP was it? It was hardly joyous life affirming music that pumped out of stereos in 1995 for the most part, not a lot set for the heart of the dance floor. In fact, out of the whole morass of a "scene", there's only one song, to me, that fairly and squarely sits on this list, and that is the spiky, exciting, headrushing thrills of Ready To Go, by Republica. Now Claire and I had a very long argument since she didn't think this song was Pop, so let me state my case. Band fronted by former model, containing pointless other blokes, but committed to soaring, tuneful nightlife themed thrills? So far, so Blondie surely? Ready To Go is a song of rare, amazing choreography, bouncing along on the rhythms of the wide eyed clubber, about to embark on a night of mayhem. It's a song about expectation, nervous excitement as your pals and you storm out of the house in terms of thrills and clubs. That sounds a lot like Pop to me. Besides, there's no fade out, the song ends sharply and abruptly, never losing it's fizz, or it's momentum. The aggressive vocals shout and cascade all over you, until you can't help but shout along. That's not sing, but SHOUT. And if you are like me, you have, let's face it, been ready to go, from the rooftops, shout(ing) it out. A perfect line, the magic of the night summed up pefectly. If you've never had a night out in a city, full of people, and truly believed you and your friends are the centre of attention, you haven't lifed. And I know when I thought that, felt that, Republica were playing in my head, over and over again. Frankly, what could be more Pop?

I don't know a lot about Republica, and researching them would probably not make me love this song any more (I know the lead singer is called Saffron, and she had proper red hair) and that's about it. Ready To Go will always be a feeling to me, an emotion, a place, the heart stopping moment between drunkeness and sobriety where the whole world stops, and only you remain, as head of the planet. And what, surely, could Pop better represent.

Truly, and simply, amazing

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #23 - Biology by Girls Aloud

2006-02-08T04:46:00.000-08:00

Adem: Fairly appropriate that this song be the next Aloud entry into the list, seeing as it is literally only MERE WEEKS till the lovely ladies visit our ("our' being myself and the CFBgoespop ladies) home country of Australia, in gear to launch "Biology" as their first 'proper' (ie: properly promoted) single here.

Asking me what my favourite Girls Aloud song is would be like asking me what my favourite Madonna song is. Even though I know the answer to both, there's such a fine line between songs that it really is a difficult decision to make within yourself. It's even tougher to go sharing such bold statements outside of your mind.

Up until "Biology", "Love Machine" pretty much only JUST found itself as my most treasured Aloud single. But then again, has there ever been a single as eclectic and glorious as "Biology"? My honest opinion is that no, there has not. I could very well pass away tomorrow and would be content in knowing that I had lived my life long enough to have heard the greatest pop record of all time.

You see, for me, this song has easily trumped my original choice of Pat Benatar's "Love is a battlefield" as pop musics finest moment. The first time I heard it, I got goosebumps. The second time I heard it, I found myself crying with joy at the chorus (not a joke, I cried real tears). The third time I heard it, I knew it was the greatest piece of music created in the history of sound.

I, like Claire with her "...Baby One More Time" entry earlier, don't know whether anything I say could ever quite do this song the justice it deserves. I almost think that it may even be too good for the general music consumer. I mean, it takes all of the greatest elements of every single brilliant moment ABBA had and gives it a tonne of really high quality cocaine, throws in a chorus that sounds as if it was molded on the genius robotics only found in sweetness of the remade Stepford Wives movie, and, god, that piano... It's all just too much for mere mortals to take in, surely?

The lyrics, and the vocal delivery, are just several hundred levels of amazing as well. "So I've got my cappuccino to go, and I'm heading for the hills again" is true Aloud-Avant-Garde joy, and when they pipe in with "We give it up... and then they take it away", I can, everytime without fail, feel every single hair on my body stand on end, ready to leap from out of my skin, onto the nearest dancefloor to begin some kind of insanely dramatic dance of life.

But easily, without any doubt, the songs most shining moment comes from the line: "The way that we talk, The way that we walk..." Such a simple line, yet so effective. The tears of joy I mentioned earlier? That was the line that got me, and still does get me.

This will be the single I forever remember Girls Aloud for. It will be the first song that comes to my head whenever someone says "Pop music". Till the day I die, I can assure you that no other song will ever quite match, let alone beat, its utter brilliance and shining glory. If a song were to ever trump "Biology" and its greatness, I'd imagine that there would be serious global damage, because surely people's ears are just not ready for anything THAT amazing.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #22 - Club Kung-Fu by Vanilla Ninja

2006-02-08T01:12:00.000-08:00

Alyson: The next time some slack minded waster with too much time on his hands comes out and bemonds downloading music, they might want to reflect on the amazing barrier deconstruction this had lead to - believe me, when I was young, 30 seconds of a song from America was an amazing, and quite wonderful treat, while you waited the 6 months for Straight Up to be released. Now, you can keep easy and simple track of charts from all over the world, which is wonderful if your own charts, like Australia's, are bloody awful. For tucked away in the recesses of the world are amazing acts waiting for YOU to go out and discover them - which is why, in the middle of a depressing run of #1 singles for the likes of Akon and Nitty, last year, in the midst of downloading despair, I stumbled upon the greatest girl band on the planet - Vanilla Ninja.

The Ninja, for the unitiated, come from the land of estonia, or 'Stonia as I call it, and comprised Maarja (later replaced seamlessly by identical twin Triinu), Katrin, Piret and Lenna in the year of 2003. They are so popular in their home land, Club Kung Fu was written and perfected purely for Song For 'Stonia, complete with a Kung Fu themed dance that involved thrust kicks, hand claps and general jumping around. The song itself is a classical piece of euro-pop aimed solely for the heart of eurovision, lasting just over two and a half minutes long, and carrying on like the best party you've ever heard for it's whole running time. It's an aggressive, in your face piece of joy pop to bounce along to and sing along to. Of course, for a song of such tremendous fun, there's a lot to enjoy. Cheap and cheerful Chinese sound effects such a big Rank style gong and some fabulous Oriental themed guitar, and some of the greatest lyrics committed to song: "Hear that DJ playing a record/best thing, after Def Leppard" and such like girl chants designed to stick in the brain rock through the speakers and crackle and fizz with pure pop excitement. The girls themselves are the cherry on a delicious cake - fiesty, glamorous and full of energy, they tear into their work with an almost sinister joy - in this case, they sound posessed and determined to get in eurovision. Club Kung Fu is such a riot of colour, sound and movement, and yes, bad dancing, it'd charm the frown off a Bob Facking Dylan fan.

And now, to the point of this post, which is to use the phrase Michael Fucking Ball as many times as possible. Have I said Michael Fucking Ball enough yet? Well I'll say it again, Michael Fucking Ball. At the song for 'Stonia competition, the Ninja stormed the public vote with 66.5% of the population saying, yes, please, send the Ninja to eurovision - but no, for there was also a panel vote, and on that panel was Michael Fucking Ball, and guess what? He had the Ninja NINTH (NINTH!) which meant no Ninja at eurovision - Michael Fucking Ball, who wouldn't know a good tune if it smacked him in his benny mush, judged it not worthy. Frankly, I think that proves my point. One of the most wonderous, demented pop thrashes of the last 10 years, and an absolute joy, so worthy of a place on this list.

And oddly, no place on it for Michael Fucking Ball...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #21 - (You Drive Me) Crazy by Britney Spears

2006-02-07T03:46:00.000-08:00

Claire: As a serious musicologist, specialising the field of Britney Spears, it’s fair to say that my brain never truly accepts “Sometimes” as Spearsy’s second single. Oh OFFICIALLY, it was, and if some other contributor wishes to have a stab it, all to the good, but to me, Britney ballads have always underwhelmed – there’s a lot to enjoy in them (not least Sometimes rather jolly harbourside literally interpretative coy dancing) but, how can I put this, they are rather like the support act at a concert. The exciting pop thrills in Britney’s early work are balanced out by a selection of America’s Sweetheart ballads that are generally quite skippable (as a functional guide, tracks 6 through 10 on the first album are hard work to endure, after 5 of the best tracks in pop history, with The Beat Goes on a divisive issue). Besides sometimes has just SO much white, someone was clearly suggesting something. So for the chronological order of the generations most fantastic pop star, we skip straight to single #3, (You Drive Me) Crazy.

When I said before …Baby One More Time was the greatest song of all time, I wasn’t lying, but conversely, it’s (You Drive Me) Crazy (note, brackets, always a good thing in a pop title) that I play the most of any Britney song purely for enjoyment. …Baby One More Time is like a fine wine to be savoured, while (You Drive Me) Crazy is more of a TAB Cola or a Mello Yello – still fantastic, but a lot more fun. It’s oft overlooked in discussions of the greatest Britney songs for just this reason - the craft in the song isn’t as wonderous or amazing as in other Spearsy songs, it’s probably a lot more sugary and fizzy and childlike in it’s thrills, but it’s probably one of the last time, at least in my opinion, it looked like a hell of a lot of carefree fun being Britney Spears.

Backed in a (for the time) rather iconic pairing with a clearly bewildered and confused Melissa Joan Hart (whose face when the song STOPS! still makes me laugh) and performing in front of a large orange sign that said CRAZY, it’s the Britney video that I enjoy the most. I’m always angered by anyone (as I’ve said before) who finds early Britney “robotic” – she has a unique, distinct vocal style, not just on the ever popular delivery of the word “meh” and “Jum-pingggg”, but in her ability to go from sweet honey vocalled innocent to possessed dervish in the chorus of one sentence (Britney’s under-rated singing ability has been known to see me start arguments). I’d imagine that for Max Martin and co, this was fun to produce, a cow bell here, some faux scratching there, everything sounds like the kitchen sink of late 90s Pop production was thrown in the mix. Lyrically, it’s straight and direct - …Baby One More Time was coded, and a bit murky as to it’s intentions. (You Drive Me) Crazy is straight from the SAW school of lyrics: “You drive me crazy, but it feels alright” speaking nothing but universal truth about young love. Above all else, it’s heart of the dancefloor stuff, in a way that …Baby One More Time never quite has been. The energy and enjoyment this song still engenders in me is always enough to make me feel about 14, which is a true and brilliant facet of great pop.

I could tell you a lot of fascinating and well researched Toby Cresswell style facts about this song (FACT! It was only released on a 12” single in the US, which hurt sales and FACT! It was a tie with the Melly J-H film Drive Me Crazy) but in simple terms, this song is important in convincing me that Britney Spears was the most vivacious, clever and wonderful pop star on the planet. Three singles, radically different, three different images, all wonderfully choreographed and iconic. She was special, she was glorious, and she was here to stay. The rest, you felt, would take care of itself…

For those keeping score...

2006-02-06T15:57:00.000-08:00

...this is entries 1-20, I think we've already covered a wide poptastic scope. In fact, I'd suggest, it also makes quite the IPOD playlist...

Betty Boo - Doin' The Doo
Britney Spears - ...Baby One More Time
Dannii Minogue - All I Wanna Do
Deborah Gibson - M.Y.O.B
Girlfriend - Girls Life
Girls Aloud - Sound Of The Underground
Hanson - I Will Come To You
Holly Valance - Ricochets
Kim Wilde - Kids In America
Kylie Minogue - I Should Be So Lucky
Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes - The Block Party
Liz Phair - Why Can't I
Madonna - Into The Groove
Melissa - Read My Lips
Mint Royale featuring Lauren Laverne - Don't Falther
Rachel Stevens - Some Girls
Spice Girls - Wannabe
Take That - Never Forget
The Banana Splits/Liz Phair - The Tra La La Song
The Twins - All Mixed Up

Magical, thankyou Toby Cresswell for your stupid book - long may it continue...

CFB

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #20 - Don't Falter by Mint Royale featuring Lauren Laverne

2006-02-06T03:07:00.000-08:00

Claire: When we live on a planet where songs with the ability to uplift and delight are considered the lightweight songs, and 9 minute miserable epics the "real", you sometimes get the feeling that music was a bad idea, one that the populace couldn't handle. Why a nation would want to huddle around it's IPODs listening to James "Rhymes With" Blunt, when they could be out enjoying the sunshine and falling in youthful messy and disastrous love is such a bewildering notion, if we explained it to aliens, they'd laugh us out of existence. Bizarrely, one of the most amazing pieces of pure sunshine pop of all time isn't held up for the praise it deserves more often, but that's what I'm here for - which brings us neatly to summing up Don't Falter.

Lauren Laverne, for those who don't know, was the lead singer of the most fabulous girl band you never heard of, Kenickie (more of whom later). To cut a long story short, on the verge of hotly tipped mega stardom on the back of some amazing, hilarious power pop, Lauren got cold feet, began to hate London, went a bit mardy, and made a misery tinged epic called Get In! which saw Kenickie dropped from their label and Lauren never speaking again to her ex bandmates. Subsquently, this rather angular talent hasn't fulfilled what looked like a glorious amount of potential, and was working as a DJ at last check. I'm not sure of her current relationship status, but post Kenickie while she was home in Sunderland having a break, I know she penned this song in honour of her then boyfriend, some bearded guy out of Arab Strap (I know, I don't know either). Dance act Mint Royale picked up the beat, and a glorious, amazing collaboration was born.

Don't Falter is what musicologists would call "Sunshine Pop" - a song with no other aim or reason in life than to bounce, soundtrack young love, and celebrate summer sunshine. Oddly, Lauren sounds a little like she's struggling with the vocal, as if distracted, but it adds to the charm, since she never once overpowers the track. There is not a single wasted second in the entire song, but it's far from bombastic. I consider this a very english dance track in many ways - it's got a charm to it that's just amazing. It's love, it's summer, it's stolen kisses, and it's youthful exubarence all in one fantastic pop song. And it's full of depth too: "You must decide," intones Lauren, "to risk your heart for love to find you". Once again, there's a strutting beat wrapped in the song - it had an ability to inspire, to make you dance, and to go out and find someone to snog, right now. Summer is for the young. This, frankly, is magnificent.

Whatever Lauren Laverne did after Kenickie, whether she's feels any pangs of disappointment the spiky young gang of mates fell apart, we at least knew she was happy. No one could sing this song with the feeling she did, and not be happy. She was in love. On Don't Falter, she shares her exhilaration with the world. It would be a churlish planet that doesn't feel there's something wonderful about that.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #19 - Kids In America by Kim Wilde

2006-02-06T02:50:00.000-08:00

Alyson: Pop is a tricky beast to analyse on this list – I’m never sure we’re doing things justice when we analyse them. You could probably by now a make a serious distinction – there are 3 types of song on this list – songs that are on here for our own, biased personal reasons to give them a credit and a positive write up, songs that are on here because of their historical pop importance, and there are songs that need to be in here because they are fantastic and overwhelmingly fun, and because we’ve probably grown up singing them into our pink hairbrushes. Too often these “greatest songs” lists have all sorts of songs that no one knows, like a Tool B side, to show off the creators vast and fascinating knowledge, when no one is likely to want to play them for enjoyment, as if the sin of creating a fun, catchy pop song you can cherish by singing into your hairbrush and have fun to is a terrible thing. Kids In America, of course, is a definitive hairbrush classic.

Kim Wilde was the daughter of 60s pop star Marty Wilde, and was thrust forward into the world with Father Wilde pushing her forward as a new wave star and backing her all the way. Kim, especially early, never looked fully self confident in her role, blinking nervously through interviews and video clips, but doing her best and imbuing her songs with as much fun as possible. She would go on to do many great things with her pop career, not least of all the quite remarkable “Cambodia”, 1980s synth pop meets strident political statement She would find herself in the charts time and time again, before packing it all in and becoming a gardener. It’s strange that the Kim Wilde story seems to have fallen into the cracks of musical history, but with Kids In America, she should always be exalted when lists like this one are collated.

Kids In America would be in anyones synth pop hall of fame, bouncing along on a heavy early 80s keyboard beat, the perfect tune for all aspiring pop fans to dance along to (and probably, we fell in love with Kim for her nervous dancing in the film clip, which threatens but never quite manages to hit it’s stride). It’s an exhilarating and thrilling single shot of adrenalin through the pop system, celebrating pops ability to lift you out of a dirty town. Above all though, this song is definitively fun and funky, full of a delirious and giddy child like joy. If the ethos of Into The Groove is solving your woes through dance, Kids In America is about the power of imagination, that youth is best lived with pop on the stereo, and with an innocent joy that if you could just get out, that if you could get over to the other side of town, things would be an awful lot better. And there’s no question that for anyone, particularly girls of my age, it’s been turned up LOUD on a hi fi or record player, and serious joyous dancing is undertaken.

After all, Kim Wilde, an English genteel pop star, blinking nervously, extolling the virtues of the kids of east California, a world she didn’t know, with joyous, nervous energy and excitement? It’s hard to think of a more apt summation of Pops power to make you dream. Take THAT Bob Fackin Dylan.
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Shane: What makes a pop song, well, POP? Is it the catchy lyrics, a chant that gets into you head and under your skin, simple yet brilliant riffs, or the ability for it to transport you back to how old you were when you first heard the song? Well, when you are talking about Kids In America, then you can answer yes to all of the above; in spades.

From the endless chants of Na Na Nanaaaa and the repetition of the title, to that keyboard that travels through at least half a dozen memorable riffs in the requisite 3 and a half minutes – KiA has it all.

Someone told me that the true mark of great pop is if it makes you, to quote Madonna, "dance for inspiration". There is no way that you can hear KiA and NOT dance – believe me, you WILL be dancing like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club within a minute. Or your money back. And you can't tell me that you, regardless of gender, haven't hairbrush mimed to this song at least one. I know I have, and was I inspired? You better believe I was. I was as inspired when I was a kid as I am to this day; and for that I salute you, Ms Wilde. Huzzah!

And now, on a more critical bent - the lyrics, which show us the eternally upbeat power of dancing and having an all in knees-up against the bleakness, cruelness and unkind nature of the city (as portrayed by the aforementioned keyboard, with their imitation of car horns and other modern annoyances). Even the shout-out to East California (take THAT, LA) is full of sheer unbridled positivity, the likes of which would not be touched upon until a little lady named Gibson plugged the kids into the mains.

And like it or not, THAT is the power of pop
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1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #18 - Into The Groove by Madonna

2006-02-06T00:48:00.000-08:00

Alyson: In an ideal world, pop stars would never age, never grow up, never falter, and never make mistakes - they'd stay young, lithe and perfect, glamourous, unattainable, and their songs would reflect that. There would be no mis-steps into adult ballads, no searching examinations of other musical genres, no mess and no nonsense. For Madonna though, it's these mistakes that make her career somewhat special - a willingness to fight, a willingess to change with the times. Without the mistakes (The Sex Book) and without her flaws, she wouldn't be the same. She's a flawed person, but a remarkable pop star, especially in the early days when Pop got her out of the rat race. We couldn't do this list without her really.

Claire and I aren't insane, mega Madonna fans - I'm not sure why that is, possibly there's just always been someone else we've been more into, someone new and fresh, and she's been in the background, making amazing pop - Madonna after all has been in our whole life, ambition crazed, doing anything to stay on top, never truly defeated, and we've probably taken her for granted in some ways. The Immaculate Collection, after all, is the greatest Greatest Hits collection in the history of music - perfect pop from beginning to end. Certainly, we wouldn't be doing this list without her. Although in some ways we argue modern Pop stars started with Debbie Harry, without Madonna's obsession to escape the rat race and get front and centre on MTV, 90% of this list wouldn't have happened. There's probably bigger Madonna fans on this collaboration than us, of the woman herself, but even we know she's the most inspirational and important pop figure we will write about on this list.

Insanely, we've probably not defined what, to us, is pop, so far as it goes on this list. Pop to me is an attitude, a feeling - the belief in a music that can take you out of the ordinary and make you dance and move and change your perceptions. It's not novelty, it's not cheap, and it's not throwaway. It's a feeling in many ways - and if any song truly will underscore that, it's Into The Groove. It's a song that's not really on this list for it's tune or remarkable musical impact (although we could rave about that too, but it's deceptively good in that regard) - it's here for it's attitude. We find something very important in pop songs that centre on music to forget your problems and get your cares out on the dancefloor. Into The Groove would be here just for one line, "you can dance, for inspiration" if nothing else, since it's at the heart of the pop credo. It's almost a moot point to discuss this song in any terms other than celebrating it's joy. It's a simple and pure expression of dance floor magic, the ability to use music to lift yourself out of a depression, out a funk. Simply and purely, it's a song about escape, maybe the first modern pop song to express that desire - and that's something very, very special to celebrate. Poets, tedious wordsmiths and miserable indie "gods" will never write a line to match "Only when I'm dancing do I feel this free".

Truly, a work of art, and an inspiration. It's far more important a song than you might think.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #17 - M.Y.O.B by Deborah Gibson

2006-02-05T08:15:00.000-08:00

Claire: When I was growing up in the late 1980s, few pop icons had a bigger impact on me than the seemingly perfect blonde eyes and teeth stage girl bred talent of Debbie Gibson. I even had a Debbie Gibson hat with DG on it in sparkly silver letters. I would venture to say if you asked a lot of girls my age their main pop memory of 1989, Electric Youth’s synth pop stylings, insanely over the top video and Debs vivacious energy would spring decisively to mind. She was a particularly unique pop icon, given that shewas a child prodigy with serious musical and song writing ability, who probably could have been a serious boring stodgy singer songwriter, but who, circa Electric Youth, embraced Pop fully and utterly, and loved every single second of it.

Deb, of course, fell quickly and decisively out of favour after that song though, and was oddly finished by 1990. That’s finished in chart terms of course, not finished as an artist. She’s ploughed on, through broadway plays, through mad stalkers, through appearances in Playboy, and through meddlesome fans whinging about her website over and over again. A full decade after her glory years, and newly re-christened Deborah Gibson, she stepped back into the world of proper album making with “M.Y.O.B” – rather sadly, the last 6 or so tracks on the album are a bit adult and naff, some jazz, some noodling, and some more contemporary adult ballads, not much to write home about. But on the title track, the old sparkle was right there, and Deborah, mature adult, became Debbie, teen icon, once again.

“M.Y.O.B” stood for Mind Your Own Business, and it’s as superb a track as Ms Gibson has committed to record. Built initially around a chorus of chanting children gossiping in a playground, the skipping rope/hopscotch beat is sensational, fantastically bubble gum. Debs meanwhile carries the gossiping child motif into the lyrics, relaying the song as if repeating some serious goss to the gathered chanting massive. The kids, meanwhile, are having none of it, intoning to Debs, frankly, to mind her own business. So Debs winds up chanting dementedly to herself, calling and responding to her own conflicted thoughts. By the time all this has gone on, the kids are back into the goss, chanting “1-2-3-4, tell me what you know and I’ll tell you some more!” which of course let’s Debs get out more of her concerns about the hapless relationship of Cathy and CJ and Jackie, sitting at home thinking everything’s fine. The whole song is purest, wonderful bubblegum, straight out of the late 1970s, but wrapped around a hypnotic beat and a rather angst riddled lyric.

Of course, it was a decade past her glory days, so “M.Y.O.B”, despite a rather touching and long sleeve note thanking those who stuck with her, sold about 26 copies around the world. It’s all a bit unfair, but if it’s the last committed pop moment of a loved, but oft overlooked, figure in Pop history, it’s a fitting testament to a really rather fabulous talent.
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Alyson: I don’t really remember being enamoured with Debbie Gibson – I think I probably had enough to worry about with Collette and her fun foam pens thankyou very much. It was only later I began to get into the Gibson canon, but I still found a lot of her work a bit earnest and adult – Lost In Your eyes? What was all that about?

However, I do absolutely love M.Y.O.B. If it had been sung by someone young and up and coming, I think it would have been a smash. I love that there’s so much deeply buried in the lower levels of the song, different chants and noises to enjoy, and I love that’s there’s two Debs vocals going on in the song, a dark, gossipy Debs and a more thoughtful, concerned Debs. You can’t go wrong with a song that is based around kids skipping rope, and chanting in a playground. To the best of my knowledge, there wasn’t a film clip to it, which was insane. Surely Debs as a gossipy teacher whispering ½ truths to her kids would have been a sensation?

This is of course, fabulous, and fully endorsed by me as an entry on this list, not least because I love the use of the word POW, and because of it’s sheer funky pop brilliance. Like Britney, having an adult vocal doesn’t make it any less. Comfortably to me Debs best work.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #16 - All Mixed Up by The Twins

2006-02-05T08:11:00.000-08:00

Adem: To this day, it truly saddens me that those crazy Blakeney Twins were not given a hit single in their rather short musical career, because at least one of their three songs deserved to be number 1 for years. The then stars of Neighbours were regarded as quite the sexy pair, and would later be hailed by many as "The Original Izzy Hoyland's", except nowhere near as electrifying.

Or, you know, good.

Yes, they may have come across as rather saturated club anthem seekers, but they were gorgeous, spunky (in a time where the term "spunky" was quite "hip") and were two of the shittest dancers you would ever see in your entire life. It was paramount that they attempt the leap from soap stars to pop stars, after all, Kylie and Jason had done so well following these guidelines, and with the Stock/Aitken/Waterman hit factory - why couldn't they?

"All Mixed Up", unsurprisingly a Stock/Aitken/Waterman production, will forever stand in my eyes as the greatest Australian pop single EVER made. The typical PWL bassline, and the kitchen-sink vocal arrangement stink of the dawn of 1991 - yet if it were to be played in a club today, I can almost guarantee it would be stinker-free and go down a storm. If it were re-released it would probably sell more today than it did then as well.

The song, one about two girls (twins in this particular example) are both seeing the same man, is somewhat touching. You see, this man just cannot decide which of the two girls he wants to be with, hence the lyrics "All mixed up, it's so confusing". Confusing indeed.

Words such as "indecision" are thrown around carelessly by our beloved sister-twins, sister-twins in the public eye years before the Veronicas would enter our homes and hearts. It really is an almighty pity then, that these beloved ladies and their outstanding debut single did not ignite our charts alight. I cannot recall how badly it tanked in Oz, but I have found that it peaked at a disappointing #77 in the U.K.

Where are they now? Those cheeky twins (cheeky before the Cheeky Girls) now run a phenomenally successful toy company in the states. Their own toy company, mind you. Apparently, they're quite filthy rich because of it.

I'm guessing their return to pop may not be happening anytime soon then. What a depressing shame.

BONUS: Download the video clip in all its glory!!>
posted by im-always-right.com @ 10:05 PM

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #15 - ...Baby One More Time by Britney Spears

2006-02-05T03:13:00.000-08:00

Claire: So, to everything, a beginning.

To be honest, I was going to do this song a lot, lot later – but the Britney Spears story, well, it only makes sense chronologically, how the worlds most beloved pop star became a laughing stock, and hopefully, rose again. And so, the beginning of the career of the pop star I still to this day actually physically worry about, with a piece of pop that is truly unsurpassed. It marked out that emerging for us to enjoy was someone very special. We just had to look after her…

…Baby One More Time (distrust anyone who calls it “Hit Me Baby One More Time”) is the greatest song ever written, in my humble opinion. No song in my life will ever have the impact this one did, to the point I can tell you where I was when I first heard it – on the floor of my old flat in fact, with a disgusting hangover. And without hyperbole, listening to the song and the other worldly brilliance of it somehow made me feel better. This alien schoolgirl, strutting around a schoolyard and basketball court, looking sad but hopeful, when I had no idea who she was, changed the way I think about pop, and music – it was no longer acceptable to just be “OK” or have a nice tune. For pop, it’s a touchstone, a before and after song for our scene. In fact, this is such an obvious induction I was tempted to just point “Look, it’s fucking brilliant – the end”. I don’t feel worthy of writing about this song – I knew I’d have to get to it eventually, it’s just to hard to articulate what I think about it – and it’s importance.

So why is it so amazing, so timeless? It sounds hard, tough, and uncomprising for one thing – it’s a very adult pop song, but I don’t mean that in a boring way. Billie , of the time, sounded like the voice of pop youth, but this was pop with attitude, something much harder and meaningful. It’s also a song that can’t be sung by anyone on the planet but Britney, it sounds like a dream meeting of her vocal style and song that was planned by committee. Almost every single word in this song is purely and simply Britneys. “Bay-beh”, “Meh” “Sigh-high-high-hein”. “You-huh”. It’s an astonishing vocal calling card, something rarely discussed in discussions of the song. I know a lot of people who think this song sounds robotic, which I disagree with. I think in the course of one song, this song mostly, she’s capable of sounding human and vulnerable one minute, and possessed and powerful the next. In fact, it’s still as powerful a song as I’ve ever heard, it’s packed with emotion, verve, and it still hits me in a different way every time I hear it. Lyrically, I don’t think any song has re-assured me or made me feel better in my life – I used to always think when my ship came in in life, this song would be playing, and “Don’t YOU KNOW I STILL believe”, sung in that powerful Britney way, would be ringing in my ears. And it was. Production wise, it’s perfect, nothing over the top, nothing gaudy that would date within weeks, but imbued with a much imitated, but never bettered strut to it that influences pop to this day.

In truth, of all the songs on this list, this is the one I can’t write about. It’s got the greatest intro in musical history, all strutting swagger and defiance, it’s got the greatest outro in musical history, from the song dropping out in a moment of uncertainty to swelling back up as Britney defiantly restates her position – what do you say?

You say, simply, it’s the best song of all time. No more, no less.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #14 - I Should Be So Lucky by Kylie Minogue

2006-01-28T23:12:00.000-08:00

Claire: If I have a beginning point, somewhere this list would have taken shape in my head, it was the release of I Should Be So Lucky, and since this is KM entry #1, it's in need of some context. When I first moved to Scotland, the popularity of Kylie Minogue made being Australian the trendiest thing possible (unpacking and handing out 200 copies of Smash Hits and TV week just sweetened the deal). Fundamentally strong of mind, not personally likable at all times, but with a quite admirable work ethic and a almost alien (in this day and age) refusal to indulge more than is necessary about her private life, Kylie Minogue will soon clock up a full 20 years in the music industry - considering this song was expected to be part of a short, packaged career, you wonder why Kylie, and not Jason, or Sinitta, or Sonia? Her musical instincts are sharper, but what of all those articles when this came out, calling her a singing budgie and laughed at all those people who called their new borns Kylie? Are there clues in I Should Be So Lucky to suggest a long and lasting career?

The song, of course, needs no explanation. It's main strength is it's simplicity, lyrically and production wise. There's no need for fancy tricks, its from the Stock Aitken and Waterman lyrical school of basic human emotions, a simple phrase that worms it's way into the brain from the first lesson. There's no complexity to the phrase "Dreamings all I do, if only they'd come true" on face value, but for nailing the human condition, it's quite breathtakingly poetic. It's also a peak for SAW, somehow failing to date even now, unlike some of their lesser work (Pat & Mick anyone?). And even more complex than that, the song is somehow happy AND sad, a song for getting together AND breaking up. And while you can learn the words in a day, you can sit for hours wondering what it all means - is there a dark heart in there? It's a breathtaking piece of pop, one that represents all that is good about SAW, a production unit crying out for some kind of definitive, critical re-evaluation.

There are signs, subtle signs. KMs vocal, imbued with a quiet defiance, sets it aside from some of the lesser treatments, a brilliant, loving it sense of fun ran through the joyous film clip maybe? - or perhaps she could just cherry pick the best songs, had a better musical ear, a better grip on fame, a harder work ethic. The kids knew who the star of SAW stable was though - and 20 years on, we all know - not a singing budgie, not a Madoona clone - a star, now and then.
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Alyson: Part of the shock for me in hearing about KMs cancer was the sense that I had always just presumed KM would be around forever like Coca Cola or Andre Agassi. I've written her off so many times, for Melissa, for Collette, for...everyone really. She's not the prettiest, she's not the best singer, she's not the best pop star, but she has the best songs - when she remembers to be Pop, she's untouchable, with a sense of touch and musical ability that surpasses all. When she IS NOT Pop however...

I Should Be So Lucky is part of the musical furniture, so much so I barely think of it as brilliant - I mean, it IS obviously, but it's easy to take it's simplicity for granted. There's nothing obviously outstanding to it, but it all fits together like a seamless jigsaw. And the effect on Australian Pop, for the first time an industry to be proud of, would result in a golden era for almost 6 years, in which record companies would nurture Pop acts for a long term career. Truly, the start of something special, and something special in its own right...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #13 - Read My Lips by Melissa

2006-01-13T20:01:00.000-08:00

Alyson: In 1991, a revolution took place in the playground - Kylie Minogue was out. SO out. In something of a vacuum for a Nation not immune to the charms of a fab pop princess, stepped Melissa. Cool, risque, controversial, gorgeous, strident and demanding, she grabbed everyones attention, particularly the girls of my school. We all wanted to be Melissa at the time, with her seemingly endless troupe of hunky boys in tow. It helped she launched with an Australian Pop landmark. Read My lips has never truly got the credit it has deserved, and some people hold it up as some kind of ridicule object - it is patently ridiculous, since this comes from a landmark era of Australian Pop that, in 1991, was still ongoing.

Melissa Tkautz was an actress on the TV show "e-street" (another guard change, as e-street became far more must see playground TV than Neighbours) and the plan was very, very simple. On the show, Melissa's character, Nikki, would habitually dream she was a popstar, and voila, her video clip would play - an easy, simple way to launch Read My Lips to the nation. Westside Records, the recording arm of e-street, had hoped for a top 10 hit to help publicise Melissa (she dropped the surname for her musical career) and the show, but on the 13th of July, 1991, Melissa hit #1 in the Australian charts. A star was born.

Read My Lips has a very early 90s production, but is no bad thing for it. Underpinned by sampled keyboards and sound effects, and joined together by segments and moments, it works for two reasons: firstly, Melissa is a perfect pop star - blonde, gorgeous, and glamorous, and possessing of one of the worlds finest pouts (she doesn't smile at all during the video). Her presence in this song lifts it out of ordinary hands. Secondly, the lyrics, probably pops most open declaration for a shag, are full of rather wonderful moments. Not just the famous "If you want to late til later, hands off my detonator", but also the rather wonderful spoken word interlude that ends with Melissa declaring rather emphatically "end of conversation" and the short spoken "DOITDOITDOITDOIT" phrase that crops up from time to time (not to mention the coy either disappointed or satisfied "Aren't you gonna do it?" which ends the song). It's hard now to credit the video was regarded as insanely controversial, since it features merely topless boys (including future Guardian actor Simon Baker-Denny and jigger Tom Williams) and a man who puts paint on his mouth, but the video captures the mood of the song beautifully - it's full of colour, movement and vibrancy, and was beloved by the girls of the era - in short, it's a classic, in every single way.

Sadly, tragically, heartbreakingly, Melissas two week stint at the top was cut short by of all things, Bryan Adams, and his mind numbing, bewildering, infuriating 10 (10!) week skint at #1 with (Everything I Do) I Do It For You, which spoiled the mood utterly - and by the years end, Melissa was floundering, signing too many bad management deals, and worse, losing a major award to Jenny Morris. It was a golden era of Australian Pop, but some things, sadly, never change.

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Claire: Melissa is our friend Megs B all time favourite artist, but was another phenomenon I missed out on while I lived in the UK - Read My Lips was a song I heard on a cassette sent to me by Alyson wrapped in a piece of paper which in giant orange crayon proclaimed how crap Kylie was, and how Melissa had taken her place (news to me, a very proud recent purchaser of Shocked).

I'd contend Melissa is a perfect popstar due to her vacancy and innocence. She was naive about the lyrics, and it shines through - it probably allowed them to get the references to detonators and doing it through some reasonably strict early 90s censorship. I love listening to this song, mostly because I can't imagine something so day-glo and bouncy getting to #1 these days. It's a fantastic disco/nighclub song, but I'm never quite sure WHY I love it - it's just a fantastic slice of early 90s pop, so breaking it's components down simply lessen it. And the next song was even better, but that's another story.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #12 - The Tra La La Song by The Banana Splits/Liz Phair

2006-01-13T15:17:00.000-08:00

Claire: In the late 1960s, a rather tedious cabal of the usual dull subjects (you know: Bob facking Dylan, The (UGH) Band, future readers of Mojo Magazine, Toby Cresswell) would sit around writing in their logs about the latest threat to their livelihood, bubblegum music. It seemed as though the idea that you could simply make a cartoon, or invent a band, and get the animated characters to sing a fabulous pop song was "not poetry, man" and so, they would tediously wail and threaten to punish us all by hanging up their guitars and burning their logs.

Frankly, the world would have been a better place if they had.

I could try and explain "The Banana Splits" show from the late 1960s, if I had any understanding of what was going on. The only episodes I ever saw seemed to consist of one of them being ABOUT to slip on a roller skate, and cymbals crashing as hilarity was about to ensue. The best I can gather is Fleagle (a beagle), Bingo (a gorilla), Drooper, (a nominal lion, so I'm told) and Snorky (an elephant, and all played by men in giant, odd costumes) were in a band, like the Monkees, and would have fantastic adventures in their house, and then show an episode of Squiddly Diddly. Amazingly though, the music created for this TV show was 300 times at least more enjoyable, magical, fun and enchanting than anything the sodding Band created, but hey, you don't see THAT fact listed too often do you? (In fact if I had an MP3 of late 1960s homoerotic classic "I enjoy being a boy" I'd put that on this list too)

The Tra La La Song (the title song to the Banana Splits show), of course, is dumb. Now, when I say it's dumb, I don't mean it's STUPID, please make that distinction. Stupid Pop is things like Crazy Frog, Cartoons or Ugly by the Sugababes - inane novelty, horrible tunes, no thought. Dumb in this list is sometimes a good thing - by dumb, I simply mean this song has no other intention than to be enjoyable, fun, loud, proud and make you smile. Clear? Writing a great, dumb pop song without straying to stupid is a massively fine line. This song is one of the most demented, dumb pop thrashes of all time: it only goes 2 and a half minutes, the most incisive lyric is "flipping like a pancake/bobbing like a cork", and it's the high watermark of the late 60s bubblegum pop explosion. Later in life, it was covered by (her again) Liz Phair, who sounded like she was having a whale of a time, as anyone does when they get to play with this song. It's structurally perfect, timeless, and you can sing it no matter what your vocal range. But lets also say, there's some pretty serious musical craft in this song - they've thrown the kitchen sink at it, got everyone in on the instruments, and made a joyous racket.

You could say The Banana Splits - they mean it, man...
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Alyson: This was my favourite childhood song. I learned the words within 15 seconds, and still know them off by heart. I couldn't truthfully believe anyone in the whole world could hate this song - in fact, I consider it something of a test for my friends - anyone who hates The Tra La La song isn't likely to be having much fun at OUR soirees.

It is brilliantly LOUD, and Claire is right, the show itself really was mad - not for nothing are the Banana Splits mentioned on the cover of the immortal book "Bubblegum Music Is The Naked Truth", as pop pioneers, but whisper it, there's a slight punk element to the Banana Splits. I don't think anyone has ever really sounded like this, and it overwhelms whatever session musician they got in to sing it "as" Bingo or Fleagle. By the end, they sound rather exhausted by the whole thing. I think each time I listen to this wonderful song, I find new things, like the subtly placed triangle or the backing singers going mad in the background. It's an absolute bubblegum pop classic, of the highest possible order.

As for Lizs version, it was the first, early sign she had a latent pop star in her - unlike the original, Liz sounds in control of the song, and plainly sounds like she's about to start cackling. Was a seed planted that day? Who knows, only Liz...but this is JUST the kind of song we need now...although in this tedious gangsta rap/whey faced Blunt clone era, it'd probably chart at #40...sigh...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #11 - Doin' The Do by Betty Boo

2006-01-13T02:54:00.000-08:00

Edward O: There will no doubt by many people, of a certain age, obsessed with the magic of the charts, long before they were exsanguinated by the hideous, slow death of Pop as a viable commercial force, who used to arise early on a Saturday morning to watch the Top Sixty on Rage like I did. Now, they only show the top 50, and it contains James Blunt, so why bother. My first memory of Betty Boo came on a morning like this when I spotted it at Number 16, seemingly from out of nowhere.

I had no idea what to make of this exotic-looking spitfire, who strutted down a school hallway in a leather jacket, dropping cheeky rhymes over de-rigeur early-90s pop dance, accompanied by aural AND visual AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHs and absolutely dripped cool, but I knew I loved it. Too much of a cartoon to be part of the young'un's burgeoning sexuality like, say, Madonna, but carrying with her a quirky manner that her dizzy, low-budget videos emphasised perfectly.

And the song itself was an absolute blinder. While dancing in a science lab and being pulled down a corridor by her ears by her dowdy teacher, she spat our her fun rhymes with simple, but magical wordplay: "Wipe that smile off your face, you're a side effect, like an aftertaste" being one of THE best pop put-downs of all time, interspersed with the deliciously meaningless and infectious (despite its performer-reflexive specificity) chorus. And lots of other brilliant touches, courtesy of both Alison Clarkson's excellent songwriting and the golden hands of The Beatmasters, who always cared more for danceability than credibility - the nagging noise underneath the verses, perfectly accompanying Betty's big-noting, AND the bits in the videos where she's being hated on, the massive, ascending AAAAH bits, the quick-fire but endearingly clunky beats, the Brit-girl rap that gave no attention to being streat, just being fizzy fun even though her flow's pretty great to begin with and the little flecks of dance and house that underlie the whole fantastic project.

Of course, during a promo tour for her second album, she was found miming to a backing tape. In Melbourne, a city I thought liked pop and wasn't a haven for stodgy rockists. Amazing that this killed her career back then when amazing pop stars of today like Britney can get away with it even for those who pay big money. As such, her second album, featuring one of 1992's best ballads, "Hangover", which, if Nicola Roberts MUST COVER if she tries to go solo, went completely tits up in a tide against "manufactured" pop in favour or whatever rubbish was considered more real then.

But some of us never forgot. We devoured her writing credits and dreamed of the day she would come back to smite the fun-haters. And we shall be rewarded.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #10 - Sound Of The Underground by Girls Aloud

2006-01-13T00:49:00.000-08:00

Claire: The next time some gimlet eyed would be popstar (the term used very loosely in this case) like Cosima De Vito or Marty Worrall pitches into the newspaper whinging and complaining that a reality music TV show has ruined their career and now they can't have hits, they should be given a mardy slap across the chops, and told the cold, harsh truth - you CAN have massive hits from a reality TV show, but you just have to do better than rehashing cold R&B and old Cold Chisel songs. You have to be excellent - Oprah once said excellence was a deterrent to racism - well, in this case, majestic Pop is a deterrent to bland. And how do we know this? Girls Aloud told us so, loudly, proudly, and via the liberal use of Surf guitars.

For the totally unitiated: a recap. There once was a show on UKTV (the home of many great things) called Popstars The Rivals, which had a simple premise, one person (Pete "Now listen here kid" Waterman) would form a boyband and one other person (Louis "Sharon Sharon!" Walsh) would form a girl band. Simple enough, as the two bands fought it out for the position of 2002 Christmas number 1. You might think this show would produce two rather bland pieces of fluff (especially from the man who inflicted Ronan Keating on Nanas of the world) - but you'd be horribly wrong. Somehow, someway, it actually produced the best girl band of their time, a beacon at a time when Pop is seemingly stagnant. One True Voice (the boy band) were simply blasted out of the water by a combination of sass, wit (the girls campaign slogan "Buy Girls, Bye Boys!" surely should have won a posh advertising award) and sheer majestic pop brilliance. Out of a line up and an audition process, Kim, Nads, Sarah, Tweedy and Nic have fused together to create the pop act most ahead of it's time, a band that takes dynamic risks, and which continues to excite like little other music that's around today.

Sound Of The Underground, of course, started the story. Like it's pop classic precusor, Vacation by Vitamin C, it's built around the kind of surf guitar 60s bands attempted desperately to hit, but failed miserably. There's a purring cat sound in the mix, deep down. Like the best work of Madonna, it's a song about dancing, about music, the beat, the rhythm - and yes, we hope calling it Sound Of The Underground DID annoy some tedious indie whingers. For Brian Higgins (also responsible for entry #1, All I Wanna Do, so the guy knows his way around a guitar sample), and the Xenomania team, it was another wonderful little pop milestone, but it would still take a while for the bands hierarchy and lowerarchy to become fully established, so it's not a brilliant song due to any amazing vocal tricks or flicks, but somehow it still wouldn't sound right sung by anyone else. It's an amazing debut single, at least in the all time top 10, and it's shot right throughout with a kind of liberating JOY the best songs are riddled with. By the end, the Girls sound rather possessed and demented, and caught up in the moment. If you aren't dancing by the end, there's probably not a lot of hope for you...

You could probably split the atoms a little with Girls Aloud - is it the band who are brilliant, or do they simply get great songs? In truth, it's the package, a wonderful, confident band backed by fantastic songs - what rivals you might ponder? At this stage, they were merely brilliant, but with the next single, they were breathtaking...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #9 - I Will Come To You by Hanson

2006-01-12T01:52:00.000-08:00

Alyson: One of the things that annoys me is people who say Pop is meaningless, and isn't capable of passion - it's a hoary old chestnut, as if the directness of a lyric wrapped in a tune is somehow something to be ashamed of. So far though, Claire and I haven't really looked at Pop ballads, which are deceptively easy to screw up. Britney Spears early albums, I'm looking at you. Whether it's flat vocals, or dispassionate performances, the Pop ballad often goes horribly, horribly wrong, and is the most skipped track on the CD. I would hope this song, though, gets a fair airing everytime "Middle Of Nowhere" gets a spin.

Hanson as you know by now found the excessive joy and heart stopping brilliance of Mmmbop a bit of a millstone - they were proper musicians, dammit. So following on from Mmmbop, ridiculously daft and catchy, and the slightly lesser follow up Where's The Love, they brought out probably 1997s finest ballad, possibly my favourite song of that year, I Will Come To You. I don't think Hanson had fully crossed into my brain other than my Dad Aussie Kev saying "Are they girls" and thinking he was a hilarious, original human being. The first time I heard this song, I was in a shopping centre on the Gold Coast, and I literally stopped dead, in the middle of the shopping centre to listen, lost to anyone else, in my own world. And if THAT isn't the sign of an amazing Pop song, I don't know what is.

What is there to say? It's an epic frankly. It could have been horrendous - an awful mess, a band stretching beyond their limits - but it never once feels like that. Taylors vocal belies his age, given it could easily have been ridiculous, but his harmonising with Isaac works wonderfully well. The lyrics could have been pure schmaltz, but they aren't. The fact they mean, and believe (some would say at that age naively, but I would scoff at this) every word they sing makes this a very special song. It's as much a song for each other as a song for the wider world, but it's shot through with a very special kind of emotion: I'd say that to me "Angels" for instance sounds flat, lifeless, and I will never connect with it as I do this song. There's not a lot to praise in terms of clever technologically, no jaunty tune to analyse - it's all very straightforward - it's a brilliant, powerful pop ballad in which not a single second is wasted.

It's fair to say this song means SO much to me, personally - it's a song on this list I'm proud to write about, but I have to be kind of vague. Some songs on this song have an obvious brilliance, this one, I can't properly find the words to express what it means to me. It means that my friends are always going to be there for me. It means I will be there for them. It's in my brain, and it's in my heart. It's a song that might just be mine, maybe I'm the only person in the world who thinks this should be on this list - but what is the point of music if it doesn't make you feel like that? And this song will always make me feel somehow safer and more secure.

And they say Pop can't mean anything....

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Claire: I used to, shoot me down in flames, find this song ridiculously OTT. Maybe it was selfish of me to expect MMMBop (of which more shortly) every time, but I used to find it a bit silly Hanson were attempting a pop power ballad - that isn't snobbery, but I couldn't reconcile those ickle kiddies producing anything other than silly novelty hits. Wrapped up in Spice, and dismissive of the kiddie rock, what could HANSON possibly produce, I would sneer. Something as good as Spice? I frankly missed what the appeal was. At the time.

In actual fact, I've come to realise I was horrendously, awfully wrong, because burned through Hansons desire to be proper musicians, they produced one hell of a power ballad. The power of the whole thing is pretty amazing, with even Isaac stepping up to the vocal plate - I'd say it does at times ALMOST stray into a mess, but any time I've heard it, it plays to Hansons melodic strengths. To think they fretted about being proper musicians...

There is no irony in saying it's powerful, and beautiful. But this is Alysons song, and it always will be. Nothing I can say can capture it as well as she puts it.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #8 - Why Can't I by Liz Phair

2006-01-12T00:42:00.000-08:00

Claire: They should have seen it coming of course - on the song "Shitloads of Money", she sang "It's nice to be liked/but it's better by far to be paid/I know most of the friends that I have/really don't see it that way". In 2003 though, when indie mumbler Liz Phair, critically acclaimed but stuck with a fanbase that showed no sign of growing, stepped forward with a new, poppier, more commercial direction, and fine tuned her sexually coded feistiness into a far more overt plea for a shag (HWC anyone?) via the help of the Matrix in a bid to sell more records - well, you can imagine the reaction was less than positive. In fact, many old fans (including a work experience boy reviewing it for the Herald Sun) turned their nose up violently, proclaiming Liz dead to them, she wasn't as good as she used to be - oooh, get you, aren't you a proper music fan, etc.

Of course, had they actually listened with their hearts (thankyou Roxette), those fans would have realised that Liz had actually simplified her lyrics, which wasn't a bad thing - she was speaking the universal, direct, pop versions of the language of love, lightened up, and most importantly, given her songs a tune and room to breathe her previous minimalist production hadn't allowed. If anything, Liz had sold IN rather than sell out, embracing a fantastic pop sound the equal of anything The Matrix had done up to that point and probably will ever do. It was a bold bid for re-invention that a less tedious world would have embraced, but of course, these are dull, tedious times, so it was greeted with a lot of nasty words and probably, disgusted poetry on blogs.

Why Can't I, the lead single, remains a marvel. The lyrics are direct, simple and perfect, the tune skipping along in wonderful ways, sounding exactly like you imagine love should sound. It also drops in and out, making it sound like shagging should, guitars fading in and out, Liz sounding part wide eyed ingenue, part lust struck older woman. It's all so wonderfully loud and randy, it's a heady mix, and Liz has the perfect vocal style for this kind of song, pronouncing every single word with a perfect, intelligent diction, which makes this song something else. Yes, she is a highly intelligent woman, old and sophisticated, but she's captivated by love, and swept under, despite herself. When the song drops out and slips down a gear, it's like Liz is questioning herself, before a wave of guitars renders such questions irrelevant - it's love (or lust maybe), and it must be followed. It also has one of the best censor baiting uses of the word "fucked!" in history.

Alas, such subtle, brilliant nuances are probably left to the new listener, not the "old" fan tediously banging on and clutching their copy of Whipsmart. They didn't follow Liz on her journey, but they were the losers. This is a FABULOUS pop song, a classic of its kind. It's too bad that just as Liz liberated herself from indie and blossomed, some people simply couldn't cope.

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Alyson: Before this album, I hadn't paid much notice to Liz Phair - her normal orbit was 3am on Rage, just after the new Whale single - but here she was, preened up, selling pink T-shirts, giving out sex advice, and behaving like your glamorous newly single auntie in a bid to grab a slice of the Pop market. The fuzzy, distorted guitars were out - audiotune and make up were in. The thing was, she was so GOOD at being a pop star, it was hard for us to think of her as anything else. Oddly, the "new" Liz sold as many albums as the "old" Liz, so she shed her old fans for new ones it seems - if they had stuck around, maybe it would have been nice to have Liz get paid for once.

This is a paean to the single minded pursuit of love at all costs, Liz pursuing a man who already has a girlfriend while she already has a boyfriend. It's a very unique kind of pop song, and as Claire said, it's all so loud - there's very little here that you would call "clever" - the word play is very basic, but joyous - but then, so is love. It's the sound of a woman in love, and regardless of if it was to sell more records, the production reflects that. It's straight from the SAW school lyrically, keep the human emotions basic and simple and universal.

"Why Can't I Breathe/Whenever I think About you?" - who doesn't get that? Sometimes, simple is the new clever you know.

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Edward O: Liz Phair was a woman in her late thirties when she sang this. I guess some people just can't cope with the fact that OLD PEOPLE HAVE HORMONES AND PHEROMONES and like the sex and still fall in love. Certainly, the F-rated reviews of her album suggest an unwillingness on the part of the critical massive to evaluate her on terms other than preconceived notions of what she should have, apparently, been doing. Which is stupid, because aspiring to make amazing pop singles is one of the hardest, most rewarding, yet underappreciated arts on the planet. "Why Can't I" is a great pop song - getting down to the fact that while love, a many-splendoured thing, is complex, falling in love, falling infatuation, is actually very simple. Heads spin, guitars chime, and Liz captures that moment expertly.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #7 - Ricochets by Holly Valance

2006-01-10T01:04:00.000-08:00

Claire: When I sat down to do this list, I was conscious of avoiding doing all the obvious megahits far up on the list (so, as Alyson put it "we don't get to 527 and think, hmmm, Witch Doctor by Cartoons, that wasn't so bad!") but as I've said, we wanted to pay an equal tribute to all the inexplicable pop failures that are out there - I promised Y I wouldn't just spend this entire list yelling at the people reading it, but truly, in this case, I had to.

Of all the failures we'll detail, few frustrate me more than the failure of Holly Valances second album "State Of Mind", a rather fabulous album of robotic pop, to even make the top 50 of the album charts in the UK OR Australia bewilders me to this day - I conclude it must have been down to the old Lisa Scott Lee "like you or they don't" philosophy, although that doesn't explain critical review after critical review attacking Holly, without mentioning any of the songs on the album. You honestly wondered if anyone had been given a copy or had just decided on seeing the name on the album cover it was time to cut Flick #2 down a peg or two. I must admit, on reading the reviews, I thought this album must have been some kind of horrendous disgrace to the good name of Pop, but no - it was actually quite, quite amazing. But despite some fabulous songs (surely everything I hate is merely Girls Aloud All I Want with a different singer?) no one, and I mean no one (well, apart from Cameron Adams) had a kind word to say about it, just because it was by Holly Valance seemingly. And it's just that kind of thing that has inspired this list, and the space to give songs like this a rightful glowing review.

Ricochets, a song you can pick up on an album with 50000 copies still available for about 3 bucks now, is Hollys gentlest, warmest moment on an album of otherwise rather wonderful sleazy dance tracks and electro pop. Hooked around a simply gorgeous lyric ("Don't cry/it just ricochets/into another day/into another day"), it's a song that grows on you over time, getting more and more under the skin with each listen. There's no tricks to this song at all - it's not underpinned by a sample, or an electro pop trick - the beat is pretty languid, gentle and summery, apart from the mid song interlude, but it's probably Hollys fine vocals that make it special - for too long criticised as a clothes horse at the whims of audiotune, this is a song she makes her own, although in a Rachel Stevens way - no oversinging, just gentle interpretation, but with an implicit understanding of the words and their meaning. The whole package would have sounded lovely pumping out of summer radios and DJ booths alike, and should any budding "Idol" really like to improve their cred, this is the kind of ballad that twat had in mind when he tried to claim "Maybe Tonight" was an Idol ballad "more popped up and open"...

But no, sadly, this song is a lost classic, sitting idly waiting for an appreciative audience - one this list is happy to give it - and as if that wasn't frustrating enough, this was the planned 2nd single...more on the only single, I would imagine, to follow...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #6 - The Block Party by Lisa "left-eye" Lopes

2006-01-08T23:26:00.000-08:00

Alyson: When Claire and I started this list, we reluctantly put a cross through any TLC songs on the grounds that they were, essentially, an R&B group, and more importantly, it was our grounds to turf Destinys Child and Beyonce from the list (which felt good) - so we sighed sadly, and one of us said "but The Block Party is still OK, right?" and yes, yes that was more than fine, it was nigh on essential. So here it is.

In another chapter of her mardy relationship with her TLC bandmates, Lisa Left eye Lopes wrote an open letter to them, which basically rang "You know, I'm the star here, and if don't think so, make a solo album and step up and bring it bitches!" (I'm not good at street) - and so, as an example, she went off and made the album "Supernova" and this, The Block Party, was the lead single - I'm not totally sure of the chronology, but I have a feeling it's October 2001 release was delayed due to 9/11 by which time no one was down with party jams or good time exhortations. In fact, Supernova (and The Block Party) are thus ridiculously hard to find - worse, of course, Left eye was killed 6 months later in a car crash. The Block Party though, for the two or three people have heard it, stands as an absolute pop classic.

The Block Party is purest, purest joyous bubblegum, a song all about Left eyes reminiscing for the good old days of her neighbourhood block parties from her childhood. The best thing I can say about it is that several of it the phrases in the song are now house catchphrases - many the time I have said "What's your name?" "Alyson" "And where you from" "Richmond" "And where you going?" "To the party" "Can I come?" "UH-HUH!" - not only that, hot boys are frequently "pop locket" and so on. Underpinned by the almost woozy, playground skipping rope beat, and Left eyes strangely sweet childlike vocals, the song is pretty hypnotic, to the point it feels amazingly short, and it's impossible not to get caught up in dancing to it. I'm somewhat bemused it didn't take off (or wasn't marketed) to groups of little kids in playgrounds mucking around (I would have given away skipping ropes with the first 100 copies) but it's all a moot point now.

It is a terrible shame it was such a flop, because it is truly lovingly crafted in every way - it's an addition to the legacy of a crazy, mardy R&B superstar who, with this song, became a quite brilliant POP star. Bless her, and her insane ways - we won't see her like again.

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Claire: Much like a later song I'll write about, I was holiday in the UK when this song came out in 01, and I think I first heard it late night watching Channel 4 curled up on my friends couch in her London flat, having behaved with an incredible amount of irresponsibility. Whoever was doing the introductions already referred to it as a "massive, widely talked about smash mega sensation", which was such a weird jumble of words, I often thought I'd imagined the whole thing. Surely a massive, widely talked about smash mega sensation might, you know, be available in shops - or played on the radio once?

It was only a few weeks later I found out the song peaked only at #16 in the UK charts, and heard it with a clear head. My first thought was "God, Alyson will love that" and more importantly, I couldn't reconcile my opinions of TLC as a relatively grumpy, socially on R&B group (and a darn good one) with...with this, which was so much damn FUN. It definitely didn't sound like, say, Creep. The best compliment I can pay this song is it's sound and texture comes directly from the golden era of late 60s/70s Bubblegum, with a modern sheen. It's not hard to imagine this song featuring on, say, the better musical episodes of Fat Albert or The Rock Flowers. Moreover, like the best pop songs, it's so riddled with joy, optimism and a little bit of childish stupidity (in a good way) it's just impossible to get out of your head.

Honestly, if it had been out in August 2001 instead of October 2001, I don't know if it would have been a mega hit - it was such a radical departure for anyone from TLC, and it doesn't sound like anything else, which scares radio, but it would have been fun finding out. As for why the album, Supernova, flopped - I'll be damned if I know, but that's an argument for a whole nother time. Suffice to say, it showed latent Pop talent can bloom in anyone, if given a chance...

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Adem IAR: This was the first song I ever played in my car the day I got my drivers license. I was blessed to have quite a decent CD player set up in my car so it was a hard choice, but Lisa pulled through most worthy in the end. Myself and good friend Candice were obsessed with it, much like Alyson and Claire, we often - at random moments - would shout "What's your name?" "Candice!" "And where you from?" "Fyans Street!" etc etc. We even once threw a 'Block Party' of sorts (ie: we just invited our friends and took it to the street for as long as we could before the police were called) in the songs honour.

It really should have done better than it did, I was working in several clubs at the time and they were all playing it at peak times. I also remember Channel V playing it quite often shortly after Lisa's untimely death.

It was just so much FUN. I mean, for Christ sake, it encouraged you to play HOP SCOTCH! And one drunken night, several of us did JUST THAT to the song! I guess though, around the time of its release, fun wasn't really something anyone was getting into in such a hurry - people were so worried about a building blowing up and whether U2 would be recording a song about it rather than having a good shake of their arses.

Such an upsetting pitty.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #5 - Never Forget by Take That

2006-01-08T03:47:00.000-08:00

Adem IAR: Do you remember where you were on the 13th of February, 1996? Well I do. It was the first few weeks of a new term at school, I was getting books out of my locker to head off to my next class. One of my friends came up to me and explained she needed to discuss something with me in private. Quite alarmed and worried as to what was so important and urgent that I needed to miss the first 10 minutes of my Drama class just to listen (I seriously thought she was going to tell me she had fallen pregnant, seeing as she was a bit of a cheap tart at the time), I quickly went off to the girls toilets with my friend.

The next 10 minutes are still, to this day, a blur.

My dear friend had taken me away from the harsh eye of many teenage school students to tell me of the news, in private, that "Take That have just announced they're breaking up".

I remember thinking she was pulling my leg, but the seriousness in her eyes were a sign enough that she was not bullshitting. What seemed like hours, but was probably only seconds of silence, passed. Then the tears began, and eventually they grew violent. After an hour my friend thought it would be a good idea to send me off to the guidance counselor (!!!!!!). Within five minutes of mucus-filled murmurs of "Robbie that bastard! He's RUINED MUSIC FOR EVERYONE THE SELFISH PRICK!!", I was told to go home by the guidance counselor for the rest of the day.

The Take That split affected me in ways that my mother described at the time as similar to the way she had reacted when Elvis died. They were more than just a band in my eyes, they were figures of worship. I honestly thought I'd never allow a pop group of any kind into my heart the way I did Take That after they had so viciously broken it, but of course the whole Spice Girls thing happened shortly after, and they fucked me over just as much as the boys did, but that's for another story and another time.

"Never Forget" is, in my eyes, their real final single. "How Deep Is Your Love", released as the bands official goodbye, not only made me angry, but was pretty much a cover done so badly, I honestly to this day feel its coldness was present simply to make a mockery of one of the most important music groups in history.

"Never Forget" was a masterpiece, coming at a time when Take That fans were in mourning over the loss of Robbie from the band. It was also the follow up single to the downright amazing and breathtaking "Back For Good", which should probably be in this list for obvious reasons as well a little later on. The singing choir children at the opening and closing of the track still, to this day, cause my skin to develop such an insane amount of goosebumps that it's almost frightening. The lyrics meant so much with Robbie's departure, but even MORE so when the band parted ways in 1996. "Never Forget" became an anthem of sorts amongst Take That fans, as they cried away into their pillows listening to the song on repeat till they fell asleep and their mothers came in to turn the stereo and lights off.

Now with the band reforming - minus Robbie - I cannot deny I'm extremely excited. The thought of flying to the UK - with what money I'm not quite sure - just to see one of their live shows this year is a thought that crosses my mind on a daily basis, and if I had the body for prostitution I would probably consider it more seriously. So instead, I can just bask in the new greatest hits DVD, upcoming documentary and brilliant new song "Today I've lost you".

With all this rather sad nostalgia surrounding it, I often wonder if "Never Forget" is the ultimate Take That song, moreso than "Back for good"? Probably not, but it signifies so much of their brilliance and such an important part of their history that it really should be.
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Claire: All of the above statements, re the break of Take That, were reflected no doubt in my own mind on that fateful day - I was Take That fan club member #91, which is bizarre, since I don't normally go for boy bands. There are times to this day I still think were Take That "all that" to be honest, but I know where I was when Robbie left (my back garden while my Mum passed on the news with a casual dispassion having found out on the phone) and I still know where I was when the final, somewhat unsurprising statement came through - on a Grade 12 camp, in the middle of nowhere, nursing a brused rib from a skateboard tumble. And I know where I was when I found out Anca, a German Take That fan, killed herself one day after Robbie's final concert (I was playing soccer with my cousin, with a walkman on).

Someday soon this will be someone else's dream - that's the phrase that loops in my mind when I think of Never Forget. It was, soon, it was the Spice Girls dream - and I was on board for a remarkably similar experience, in fact. Never Forget? As if I could, Take That were a band for the heart and the head. My boy band in fact. Bless.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #4 - Some Girls by Rachel Stevens

2006-01-07T23:48:00.000-08:00

Claire: When we did this list, it was, as we said, partly down to that stupid waste of trees that was Toby "Oooh, me obscure jazz collection!" Cresswells book of 1001 great singles that totally ignored all Pop totally, but it was also in tribute to let some popstars know someone, anyone, loves them. For too long, classic pop songs are overlooked on these kind of lists, despite their intrinsic brilliance lyrically and musically, just because people want to look cool when they show off their playlists or musical lists. This list, of course, only wears it's pop credentials, so let it be said - Rachel Stevens = fucking brilliance. A lot of this website is going to end up with me yelling I think, but Rachel Stevens career woes are just as baffling to me as Calendar Girl by Sophie Monk entering the chart at #35. I'm almost at the point of despairing at the charts, I really am. But enough of the ranting, for now, let's take a look at Some Girls.

Rachel, formerly the pretty one in S Club 7 (and also the one in S Club Miami who's boyfriend was always whining at her to come home), as I'm sure you would know if you are in anyway interested in this website, is bewilderingly struggling with her career, held up as something of a sinner for daring to make a brilliant pop album, while lessers like Franz Ferdinand (Yawn) mock her for her failure. It's not right, and while I only hear about Rachels trials 2nd hand from websites and my friends in London, who all say they like her, but of course, didn't buy the album. Hmmm...

Some Girls came from shinier times, getting to #2 in the charts, though I have no idea what "Sport Relief" is or was, but it explains why Colin Jackson (who would love pop) and Pat Cash (who doesn't) were doing in the film clip getting doused by water pistol wielding femmes. Pat Cash of course is just as much of a jinx as Greg Norman, so that might explain the problems - as best as I can tell, and forgive this if it's wrong, it seems to be about oral sex, and the fact that the "girl" is stuck being a giver, and not a receiver, if you follow (if that's not right, tell me what the champagne makes taste so much better?) in order to help her career. I'm always a big fan of what you might call a "strutting" beat, that is one where you can see the singer with a lot of nodding defiantly back up girls strutting down the road in the film clip. Some Girls definitely scores high on that score, it's got a positively skipping beat to be honest. As I said above, it scores highly on the subtly filthy lyrics score - and when people say Rachel is a "blank canvas", this surely plays to her strengths. Like the best word of Kylie Minogue (hardly a belter herself) in Better The Devil You Know, there's no knowing wink - the best popstars will sing anything, but do it with a coy grin that suggests the singer is much smarter than you give them credit for. Kylie knew what BTDYK was about, do you really think Rach is singing without knowledge, regurgitating other peoples words without taking it in? Rubbish, that's all I can say.

So why don't people like her? Who would know - this is a world that values James Blunt and Lee Harding for some reason, it's a cruel, wrong, awful world.
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Alyson: Pop is in difficult times right now - I can only think that Pop relies on the sale of singles, and now we all download things, rubbish that sells few copies can get higher in the charts. Certainly, it'd be wonderful if this generation found it in itself to embrace Rach, but it just doesn't seem to be possible.

I was a pretty big rap for S Club, so I do have a soft spot for Rach, and I think the last album saw several songs which improved on Some Girls - but I've almost come to accept with a sigh that the best pop songs generally fail, that people are now buying based on hearsay and what they should buy that the papers tell them too - either that or the only people not downloading are old, and the charts are going to be nana cuffed for the rest of time.

Some Girls is of course fabulous, and a revelation whenever I play it to people here in Oz, so all I can suggest to Rach is to possibly immigrate? Personally, it's all Pat Cashs fault you are on struggle street anyway, so you could smack him while you are here....

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Edward O: One of my favourite memories of 2004 was, in the midst of wondering why amazing pop singles like this never found easy purchase in the soft, fleshy part of the charts (i.e. the top), was taking a bus ride in my then-hometown of Canberra, and seeing a pair of 13 year old girls with an iPod between them, both listening to the same song and singing along. I don't think they realised they weren't alone on the bus as I was behind them and had been slumping. But they were having the time of their lives, probably wondering the same thing I was; why did they have to go to the internet to get this song? Here they were, two kinda grubby bogan girls listening to Rachel Stevens, not hearing the layers, the levels, probably not knowing who Richard X is, not knowing anything about glam, about schaffel, about the history of pop this song is now woven into, they just loved the exciting video game sounds and Rachel's guileless, sweet-as-sugar vocal delivery. But the intelligentsia have claimed Rachel for themselves, and the arbiters of taste and radio play have said "You can have her", let's play Usher instead, idiots.

I'll concede that some Rachel Stevens may be too polite and British to dent any other charts. But "Some Girls" endures with a universal charm - it starts in the shoulder and the neck - moving up to the head and infecting the brain causing other parts to move. A foot tap, a campy outstretched arm, a look towards the heavens... an aural glimpse into the land of pop perfection.

For the duration of this song, the kids get it, and all the analyses and backwards-glancing can't affect that. This is, above its complexity, a brilliantly simple pop song. The extended mix, with Rachel talking about "big platform boots" is fantastic too.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #3 - Girls Life by Girlfriend/Japanfriend

2006-01-07T16:50:00.000-08:00

Alyson: A funny thing has happened to us in the last 12-18 months, and it's this. We've found a secret, but significant, portion of the population of Australia remembers, and loved, early 90s Aussie girlband Girlfriend. We honestly thought before we started our website, it was just us, and posting about our love for them would just be ignored. It took longer than it should to come up that we loved this fantastic band, the band that will always be MY favourite girlband. Comprising Robyn, Siobhann (one of my all time pop idols), Lorinda, Jacqui and Melanie, if you weren't a girl in the early 90s playground that loved Girlfriend, you didn't get to hang around with us, uh-uh, no way. It was fantastic, in the midst of the glorious pop filled winter of 1992, to have our very own, fully functioning, amazingly crafted girl band to adore. Although their only competition is Bardot and Cherry, they are still easily untouched as our very finest girl band. Of course, this being pub rock central, they were "out of fashion" by 1993 (although GF4, the post Robyn plough on, still had a #6 hit in 1994 with Sooner Or Later), and in many ways, they missed a massive trick in not pumping out loads more merch (we had pocket money people!), but we never stopped believing in them, and their fabulousness, and thus, we present them with a worthy tribute to one of their best songs, Girls Life, the song I believe still acts as the template for the entire Spice Girls career.

In one of our most glorious Pop epochs, Take It From Me's by the Girls two weeks spell at #1 (criminally the girls only #1) was replaced on the top of the charts by euphorias Love Me Right (of which more later). In an ideal world, Girls Life would have followed it to the top of the charts. Starting with Robyns buoyant call of "1-2-3....KICK IT!", it's a paeon to sticking together against those randy, rampant boys, and crucially (note books out plagerists) mentions "Girl Power" a full 4 years before Spice came out. But there's so much to enjoy - the debut of the "Girlfriend rap" which in this case ends with "Baby Chill out, we GOT WORK TO DO!" (you can almost see Siobhann nodding defiantly), the final chorus starting with giggles, and then a second Girlfriend rap (TWO for the price of 1) about a Girls Life being "somewhere over the rainbow, you know!", Siobhanns brilliant "put em right by the door!" after Robyn sings about roses by the door - and recently, we accquired the Japanese version of Girls Life (by Japanfriend as we call them) which is so fabulous, and is sung by Robyn in a comedy Japanese accent, and where somehow the giggling even sounds more Japanese...

It's such a brilliant, brilliant song, and there will be lots more Girlfriend to come - it feels so good to give them a place or 10 on a list like this - now, if I could just meet Siobhann....coming up next on the Girlfriend list, their best lyric...

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Claire: I still remember getting off the plane, and setting foot in Alysons house for the first time after living in Scotland for 4 years, and being assaulted with "You MUST love Girlfriend!" while having a Siobhann poster shoved in my face - um, no, who are they I said, to one of the filthiest looks of all time. I don't think she's ever truly forgiven me.

I've only got into Girlfriend in the last few years as a result - I vaguely remember Take It From Me being #1 (I think the week I landed), and it is incredibly frustrating that I didn't get to join in fully in embracing them. I'm now proud to perpetuate their memory a little bit on the Internet, since when we first started our other site, there really was no information on them. Interestingly, Girl's Life goes for about 30 bucks on e-bay some days. I also love that early 90s kitchen sink production that goes into Girls Life, and any kind of fluent girl powered rapping. Unironically, I also now love the girls, for their spirit, their togetherness, and their positive outlook. In the midst of that horrible grunge period of whining and whinging, Girlfriend were a positive influence, and that was amazingly brave.

It's only fitting they make this list time and time again, and next time I induct them, I'm going to write about their most "punk rock" move...

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #2 - Wannabe by The Spice Girls

2006-01-06T14:02:00.000-08:00

Claire: So where do you begin? I mean, it's an obvious induction - a classic not just of it's time, but of all time, one of the finest songs ever constructed, the song that started the teen pop explosion of the late 90s/early 00s that makes up most of this list - you could make a case that it's the one of the most important Pop songs of all time. It made Pop acceptable for adults to like, and above all else, there have been few bands in this time so universally loved by everyone as the Spice Girls were in 1996 and 1997. In fact, if you are talking about one song marking the distinction between what this list is calling "pop" and what this list is calling "boring", it's this one. Criticising or analysing the song, that's just pointless, you know it, you love it. That they went on to better Wannabe several times over just adds to the fact the Spice Girls, in my opinion, are the greatest Pop Band of all time. In fact, The Spice Girls, to me, proved just how awful Britpop had been. Ocean Colour Scene? Chas and Blur? Cast?

So what is there to say in 2006? As the girls now have a critical respect somewhere just below a Big Brother winner? As you actively wonder what WAS it you liked about Mel C? Did you have to be there, is that it? I went to a Spiceworld screening and actively soaked in a teen pop mania that was exciting, and face it, wouldn't you cry out for such a band now, a band of purest, purest pop instead of the rubbish churning through the charts? But if that is the case, girls who were 8 when it came out will turn 18 in the near future, so there's bound to be a nostalgia rush coming up, in which those girls who collected the stickers and the posters will dig them out again and enjoy them - there will be a rush akin to that that ABBA had in the future, it's just a matter of time. So do they reform, a la Take That? I'd hope not, the Spice Girls died the day Geri walked, and everyone knows it. Once a spell is broken, it's time to move on. My memories of Spice are of their time, I don't need nostalgia. I know where I was when I first heard Wannabe, you probably know yourself. I bought the T-shirts, I bought the singles, I bought the posters - I'm forever Spice, they were my teen band, and I loved them with all my heart. Are they why I moved to London? Partly, I would have taken a year off just to follow them around the country I think - THAT is how much I loved them.

You can make an argument that while The Spice Girls (ie. Posh, Sporty) were fantasic, the Spice Girls (ie. Vicky B, Mel C) are rather unappealing people. As their solo careers piled up on the side of the road, you really did think, why, why were they so loved? Of course, Wannabe was just to good to flop. And despite what you might think now, Ginger Spice is one of the finest Pop stars to come out of Planet earth - fame crazed and shameless - in fact, the qualities you probably hate in Geri Halliwell. As for the song, to touch on it briefly, I'll get to my favourite Spice Girls song in time, but I know I found it inspirational, it was just the band I needed. Dayglo in the best sense, and lyrically under-rated, speaking to a generation of teen and pre teen girls in a way Mr so called musical poet Bob Fackin Dylan could only dream of. But enough of that, get it out, play it, and enjoy it. It's the kind of song we desperately need now.

This is brilliant, lest we forget.

1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time - #1 - All I Wanna Do by Dannii Minogue

2006-01-05T00:54:00.000-08:00

Alyson: Dignity. It's a priceless commodity, and face it, Dannii Minogue has lived a career of dignity, class and style. Oh sure, you may mock, but it would have been easy for DM to live off the KM name, to sell endless stories to the tabloids about her hatred for KM until she wound up as bitter and lost as Kirk Douglas's son or Fran Healy's Dad - but DM was a star before KM, has had her own clothing range, chocked up a desperately under-rated 15 year career in music full of hidden or under-played gems, eschewed the mundane B list path she could have taken, and stands before you, eager to please, but not at any cost. In an era where fame comes before talent, there's something admirable about that. We kinda sorta kinda know DM and KM don't get on, but is DM spilling? Hell no - she COULD, but she doesn't. She's a proper pop star in her own right as a result, make no mistake, even if her own nation criminally ignores her.

Perhaps it's this dignity that makes Claire and I love her more than "Min". All I Wanna Do, to me, isn't just the best DM song, it's the best Minogue song. It's open on the surface, a seemingly overt plea for a shag - but watch the video, and it seems like Dannii is turning back 20 years of bad chat up lines back on men who are too scared to chat her up. Mind, the lines about all that Dannii wants to do suggest a yearning for settling down herself. For all that, the songs true greatness comes just after the 2:30 mark, when it explodes into a funky, electric guitar solo that would underpin a lesser mortals guitar. The first hearing of this guitar riff, especially if late at night driving a car, is one of the most exciting discoveries in Aussie Pop history - it's greatness is up there with Melissa's "I never...I never thought I'd lose control...OOOH" as our finest national moments in Pop.

So as the song writhes with the angst of Danni's sexual frustation, it goes to emotional places her sis simply hasn't gone. If a significant Dannii revision ever takes place, the Girl album would be a good place to start. In fact, Love And Kisses And...is the best place to start, significant proof of a musical talent in need of it's own recognition.

Dannii, for once, we thought you should be #1...

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Claire: Like Alyson, I do also prefer Dannii to Kylie, not least of all because Emma Jackson could kick Charlene's arse all over the school playground - but for once, let's split DM from KM, and assess her in her own right. Re-assessing the DM canon, there's so many great Pop moments, but I wouldn't say it's the greatest DM song. I will say that to me it's part song, part performance art piece, sly about it's true intentions. I also believe Dannii is far more warm and emotional vocally than KM - All I Wanna Do is the one Minogue song that I believe really pierces. I'd say the true meaning of the video has always been pop stars can be anything you want them to be, whether you imagine they play the guitar or ride a bike or that you can shag them. Not for nothing does the guitar solo plea "Take a Look Inside My Heart" - a plea to those out there chatting her up for no other reason than she's famous or "Kylie's sister" to actually find what she, DANNII, the person, actually wants from a relationship.

All I Wanna Do is of course a sensational song, and it's hard not to warm to song that features a remix called the "Trouser enthuisasts Toys Of Desperation Mix". It's slinky, and charming, and it's thumpingly danceable. It's the kind of song the charts desperately needs now, although knowing Dannii, it'd probably go in at #13...

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Edward O: It should not come as a surprise that I rather like Dannii Minogue, and staunchly defend her, except when she's a bit rubbish which she has been lately. But, while clawing away Kylie's seconds and doing pretty well with them despite (or is it because of?) the public perception of her as an even naffer Kylie, Dannii has emotional chops, she really does. I've long thought that her underrated "Get Into You" builds a bridge from Janet Jackson's "Black Cat" to Spice Girls' "Love Thing", and hence quite a lot of the New Pop, and the fact that "All I Wanna Do" contains credits for a certain Mr B. Higgins, it should have come with a warning. Because "All I Wanna Do" is a ripper; it mixes sleazy rock guitars, sensual washes of keyboards that are like opening, exploding flower buds and a barely-hanging-on desperation in Dannii's vocals. At this moment, she stopped being naff. The world ignored her and never gave her great singles the justice they deserved, a case of the media's idea of her being a bit crap actually being a self-fulfilling prophesy rather than the logical conclusion of the work itself which is frequently top-notch (Okay, let's just pretend "Perfection" never happened). Listen to her wail - her pain is as real as the shimmering, shining surfaces are fake - she is equally as little girl lost as the lyrics say she isn't. A mass - a mess even - of contradictions, a hook of heartbreak in a flurry of dancefloor hedonism. A fantastic single, both stand-alone, in the context of the great Girl LP and as a statement of intent of what's to come (including Neon Nights, one of the best pure pop albums of the 00s).

When I listen to this, I'm reminded of what ex-Dotmusic, now Launch UK chart commentator James Masterton said about Danni's sublime "Disrememberance" - basically saying that she was a bit of a singer, a bit of an actress, a bit of a skin-mag model, but generally a mediocre all-rounder. Seven years later, the idiot man, whose columns get worse and worse the more opiniation he does, admits that yes, she has done some cracking singles. Nice U-turn, bud. But there's no need for a U-turn. Dannii's great - she's much more fun as an interviewer than Kylie and if I wanted to go out to a club and dance, I'd rather hear her DJ and hang with HER friends any day.

So...

2006-01-05T00:42:00.000-08:00

...this is a shout out to this book...

I had the mis-fortune to pick up this pile of junk - 1001 Greatest song book or whatever it's called, by one Toby Cresswell, and as is my want in these books, I flipped straight to S to see how many Spice Girls songs were in it.

Take a wild guess.

These books, pah, vanity projects. Not one single mention of the glorious history of POP music in any of them - it's pathetic. So as we leave Toby to his doubtless wonderful collection of indie rock snob bores and his how cool do I look rubbish, which he charges 59.95 (!) for, we do this...

This is a list, for free, of the best 1001 POP songs of all time - not soul, not R&B, not jazz - POP - it's a list for the joyous songs that no one catalogues - it will have Sophie Monk in it 5 times, and Bob Dylan 0...

Feels great doesn't it....

It's going to be a long list...

CFB and Alyson

Welcome...

2006-01-04T00:48:00.000-08:00

...to the 1001 Greatest Pop Songs Of All Time...

Testing, testing, 1-2-3...

Alyson

The list So Far

#1 - All I Wanna Do by Dannii Minogue
#2 - Wannabe by The Spice Girls
#3 - Girls Life by Girlfriend/Japanfriend
#4 - Some Girls by Rachel Stevens
#5 - Never Forget by Take That
#6 - The Block Party by Lisa "Left-eye" Lopes
#7 - Ricochets by Holly Valance
#8 - Why Can't I by Liz Phair
#9 - I Will Come To You by Hanson
#10 - Sound Of The Underground by Girls Aloud
#11 - Doin' The Doo by Betty Boo
#12 - The Tra La La Song by The Banana Splits/Liz Phair
#13 - Read My Lips by Melissa
#14 - I Should Be So Lucky by Kylie Minogue

By Country
Australia 5
United Kingdom 5
USA 4

By Gender
Female 11
Male 2
Undetermined 1

By Artist

Liz Phair 2
(The) Banana Splits 1
Betty Boo 1
Dannii Minogue 1
Girlfriend 1
Girls Aloud 1
Hanson 1
Holly Valance 1
Lisa "Left-eye" Lopes 1
Kylie Minogue 1
Melissa 1
Rachel Stevens 1
(The) Spice Girls 1
Take That 1