1970 Dave Edmunds: I Hear You Knocking

'I Hear You Knocking' is a cover of a popular 1955 R&B track originally recorded by Smiley Lewis. Lewis's take is a slow, piano led strut that sounds like it was recorded in a whorehouse (a fine version by Gale Storm recorded the same year follows the same structure, except she sounds like one of the whores getting rid of a client).

Edmund's version speeds it up, swaps the piano for a crunchy guitar and puts more emphasis on it's twelve bar blues source - this might be just what the 1970's Christmas parties needed, but far from bluesy Edmund's sound is thin and scratchy with a slightly distorted slide guitar chopping in and out of the mix throughout. In some ways it's New Wave some eight years early, though it also gives a fair representation of listening to a distant, half tuned in offshore pirate radio station.

Something different for 1970 then, and a nice updating of an old song (Edmunds has stayed in the Rockabilly/R&B groove for almost the whole of his career), but the updating hasn't travelled the decades too well. The nasally vocal and wiry tone sounds terribly old hat to modern ears, like some third division XTC wannabes though it's not fair to blame Edmunds for the world catching up with his sound, popularising it and then ignoring his influence. Nice, but inessential - now that is a fair assessment.

1970 The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Voodoo Chile

Jimi Hendrix has always fallen into a select band of artists who I admire more than listen to, and 'Are You Experienced' is one of the best albums I hardly ever play. An odd thing to say maybe, but I think the main reason for this is because, to my ears anyway, Hendrix always falls squarely between two stools.

Although undoubtedly loud and heavy with a blues influence, his music is rarely something you could stack alongside the straight, no nonsense rock that was purveyed by other seventies blues rockers like Groundhogs, Ten Years After etc. Conversely, the psychedelic overtones and improvisations that keep his music shifting are never anything I’ve found interesting or enjoyable enough to warrant close listening.

'Voodoo Child' is a case in point. Although, like 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', it's a track more suited for the company of other tracks on album than alone as a single (can’t blame Hendrix for this, he’d just died so this was a shameless cash in on the record company's part), that opening riff should have entered the classic rock canon and the nation's consciousness as surely as the der der Der of 'Smoke On The Water' or Slash’s squally lead on 'Sweet Child O' Mine' have. The fact that it hasn't can be put down to Hendrix squandering and abandoning it for dead once the main body of the song kicks in.

Or rather than squander, perhaps it’s fairer to say he doesn't play ball the way you'd expect - while the riff to 'Smoke' re-appears throughout and drives the song to the end (a trick employed by most bluesmen old and new), Hendrix follows a left field jazz/be-bop muse and riffs on the riff to stretch and twist it in improbable directions. Technically it's impressive, but abandoning the traditional blues structure - and make no mistake, at heart VC is your typical testosterone fuelled, macho blues pissing contest ("Well, I stand up next to a mountain, And I chop it down with the edge of my hand") - for a series of radical chord and key changes makes for a restless song. And it's restlessness doesn't nag me into listening to it again and again and again the way other macho blues pissing contests like 'I'm A Man', 'Wang Dang Doodle' et al do.

Like his contemporary Captain Beefheart, Hendrix is to be applauded for taking the lid off an established format and letting its essence run free by turning the usual apocalyptic lyrics into apocalyptic music that dips it’s toes into jazz; after all, why sing about the end of the world when you can show us what it's like by making your guitar sound like it? But just like putting roller skates on an arthritic pensioner to get them moving, the impression of speed is admirable yet false, short lived and not something that bears too much repeating.

1970 Matthews Southern Comfort: Woodstock

Oh boy, now this is going to be a toughie; 'Woodstock' manages to funnel so many of my own personal bête noirs into such a small seven inch pot that my head spins with knowing where to even start. There's just so many loose threads for me to pick at.

OK, well I'll start at the beginning; 'Woodstock' the song was written by bête noir #1 Joni Mitchell. Mitchell is a woman who only takes two things in life seriously - everything she says and everything she does. And she took Woodstock very seriously, though not seriously enough to actually be there; although slated to be on the bill, she cancelled in favour of a chat show appearence and so her tribute was written from an idealised viewpoint one step removed from fact. As a song, 'Woodstock' attempts to summarise the events that went down on Yasgur's Farm the previous year and re-cast them with the significance of a pivotal cultural point of the decade, as if everything had been building up to this and that the 'this' is an ideal worthy of aspiration. Hippies in a field of mud, basically. Or bête noir #2.

I can't honestly say I've ever been to enamoured by the hippy errr.... ethos. Sure, a lot of good music came from the era, but then the Nazi's built a lot of nice roads too, complete with their own underlying ideology of what a heaven on earth should look like. Or heaven for some people anyway. By harking back to an imagined state of pre-fall grace, Mitchell pulls a similar trick of putting the world to rights with that recurring "And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden" refrain. But in this in itself Mitchell is being ambiguous.

For is she suggesting that the post 1969 world needed to get back to the stardust and golden values of Woodstock after those new butterflies soon turned back into bombers at Altamont a few months later? Surely it was a bit too early for nostalgia, and in any case the idea that watching Janis Joplin on bad acid presents a vision of earthly perfection is laughable in its audacious naivety. Or is it perhaps a call for the masses to take the cause to another level and aim to re-build some pre-fall Arcadian paradise that's always one step behind the present, much like the ruined castles and buildings that litter the painted landscapes of Pannini and Poussin and show a recent past that was 'perfection' but is now no more?

Either way, there's a one eyed pretentiousness in 'Woodstock' (as there is in most of Mitchell's output) that doesn't sit well with what it's describing (i.e. hippies in a field of mud). Mitchell may well view herself as a latter day Rousseau, content to see a world in a grain of sand, but again, she wraps it up in a self serving idiot's guide to naturalism. And with concepts of 'nature' and 'natural' being a particular hobby horse of mine, it has the general effect of poking me through the bars with a stick to goad me into a reaction. Which I have done, but I at least know when it's time to shut up. And so I will.

Her own original version of 'Woodstock' is a simple acoustic affair where her slightly condescending vocal sweeps childlike through her chords with the wide eyed wonder of it all. Although an all English band, Matthews Southern Comfort hammer flat the rough edges and re-arrange it horizontally as a sun baked, minor key AOR ballad with steel guitar washes. But despite Iain Matthews singing with a resigned and regretful conviction that's (if anything) more pronounced than Mitchell's, the folk rock arrangement takes all that was bland about late Byrds and/or Bread and ramps it up to eleven.

Haunting and eerie or sappy and substanceless - I know which my money is on; 'Woodstock' is an early British entry into a West Coast/Laurel Canyon genre made up largely of tortured rich kids telling the rest of the world how hard their lives were or else imagining a world so far removed from their own as to be beyond parody. Or bête noir #3.

I seem to have been colouring in outside the lines somewhat with all this, and I'm probably saddling MSC's version of 'Woodstock' with more baggage than it perhaps deserves. Nevertheless, my observation of 'sappy and substanceless' is no less accurate for being a bit tart; 'Woodstock' is little more than easy going fodder for the now grown up hippies to unwind and reminisce to with a G&T after a hard day at the office. And just like them, 'Woodstock' the song is boring. Harmless but boring.

1970 Freda Payne: Band Of Gold

Written by the legendary Holland/Dozier/Holland under a lone female pseudonym for the Invictus label (long story - look it up if you want), 'Band Of Gold' tells of a newlywed bride deserted by her husband shortly after their disastrous wedding night, leaving her with just memories and the ring of the title.

Recipe enough for some gut busting drama you'd think, and in its telling 'Band Of Gold' strives to cover all bases by combining the sophistication of Motown with the raw soul power of Stax. It's a fine ambition, but it's one that unfortunately falls short in its realisation - things fall apart, the centre does not hold and the mashed clash of styles sends this careering off into an orbit all of its own.

Because nothing about 'Band Of Gold' sounds quite in tune; it's loose and it's spongy and it has a rubber backbone where a hard funk spine should be, and that's despite (or even in spite of) the constant repetition of a one note drum beat that drips throughout like water torture. Payne herself is keen to get on with things, but even her heartbroken holler can't break free from the wheelclamp of that pedestrian backing (by members of the Funk Brothers no less) that lets any urgency escape like air from a punctured tyre.

Despite this, 'Band Of Gold' is saved from ruin on two fronts. For one, Payne's vocal is a strident and impressive performance, strong enough to forge the tune all by itself through the sheer repetition of the lyrics where each 'Since you've been gone' sounds like a fresh page rather than old news. But those self same lyrics also provide a mystery of their own that keep things interesting; Freda's new hubby has left (after sharing separate rooms on their honeymoon) leaving her to pine "Hoping soon that you'll walk back through that door. And love me like you tried before". 'Tried before'? What does that mean I wonder?

Was he impotent? Would some Viagra have helped, or was Freda, freshly taken 'from the shelter of my mother', in fact frigid? Or did he have a different kind of loving altogether in his mucky mind? We are not told. Commentators have spilled gallons of ink in print hypothesising as to what was thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge in Bobbie Gentry's 'Ode To Billie Joe', but who cares about that? I'd be far more interested to know what went on in that bridal suite than what some country hicks got up to. But that's just me I guess.

1970 Smokey Robinson & The Miracles: The Tears Of A Clown

Very much a product of two talents, firstly Stevie Wonder wrote the original backing track to 'Tears Of A Clown' in 1966 but couldn't come up with any lyrics. After hearing a playback, Robinson picked out the sound of a circus in its recurring steam driven calliope motif and took it as inspiration for a set of lyrics. The rest, as they say, is history.

The main theme of 'Tears Of A Clown' is a typical Wonder drum beat driven R&B foot stomper that précis his own 'Uptight' written the same year. Far from everything being alright this time, Robinson's girl has gone leaving him lonely and hurting; "I'm sad, oh sadder than sad; you're gone and I'm hurting so bad", though to the world at large he's still happy as larry. In taking his 'putting on a brave face' cue from 'Pagliacci', 'Tears Of A Clown' presents an incongruous union of words and music, but a further twist of perversion sees it using that fairground motif to illustrate the vocalist at his lowest ebb and the "I cry the tears of a clown, when there's no one around" refrain.

It would have been easy for all this to collapse into tricksy gimmickry or even the corn of novelty (which is what the infamous 1967 promo video of a clown rubbing fake tears off his face in an empty television studio tried it's damndest to reduce it to), but 'Tears Of A Clown' is the satisfying sound of two masters of their art at the top of their game and in no mood for dropping the ball.

Soul doesn't get much better than when it comes from Robinson's mouth, and although his heartbreak lies a few keys lower than the intricate music it still manages to dominate and ensure that his sadness overrules anything its bright facade has to say. Which after all is what the song is all 'about'. And if you can dance to it with abandon (which many did, do and will), then all that does is confirm that Robinson's clown mask, much like the song itself, is a totally believable one. One of the shiniest jewels in the Motown crown.

1970 Elvis Presley: The Wonder Of You

His last UK number one while still among the living, 'The Wonder Of You' is a live recording (Presley never cut this track in a studio) of a 1959 ballad that had been a minor hit for Ronnie Hilton. And 'live' for Presley in 1970 meant the pop orchestration of Las Vegas cabaret and all that it entailed.

And fitting to where it was recorded, 'The Wonder Of You' is dressed up in a spangly rhinestone suit and given the full Vegas makeover. But alas, the suit is ill fitting and, like the man wearing it, carries way too much slack around the middle. Presley's voice is in good enough form, but those opening 'woah woah's are there to get the crowd going rather than stress any emotion, and that awkward, ascending note that closes may have made sense on stage with Presley raising a clenched fist in a supper room doused with spotlights and mirrorballs, but on record it heads down a road to nowhere.

For the bits in-between, it's a chicken and egg scenario - was the pumped up orchestral pomp scored to match Presley's histrionic mugging, or did he feel obliged to deliver such an over egged vocal to keep up with the bombast? It's not as if the song needs it anyway, it's meant to be an expression of gratitude rather than a declaration of enduring love, though look closely and it's obvious that Presley is aiming the:

"When no-one else can understand me
When everything I do is wrong
You give me hope and consolation
You give me strength to carry on"

lyrics to the devoted fans who turned up night after night to chuck their knickers at him. The back to basics rawness of his '1968 Comeback Special' already seemed a distant memory, and by 1970 Presley had accepted his place in the popular culture pecking order. No more new ground was to be broken and he was savvy enough to know which hands to keep sweet if he wanted to be fed. 'The Wonder Of You' is essentially a souvenir for the faithful, but shorn of the concert dimension it's too heavy handed by half and rather a sycophantic and unappealing affair when all's said and done.

1970 Mungo Jerry: In The Summertime

It's very rare to see an electric folk jug band at the top of the charts. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I'm seeing one now - but how else would you describe Mungo Jerry? Led by Ray Dorset, Mungo Jerry (named after one of TS Eliot's 'Cats' fact fans) served up a raggle taggle image of ne'r do well travelling folk playing on instruments (including that jug) they'd knocked up in their shed. One can only wonder if a young Kevin Rowland had been paying close attention.

Accordingly, 'In The Summertime' has the ramshackle, mechanical feel of a Victorian steam engine riding over cobbles, and that good natured groove alone is enough to plant a grin on anyone's face. Despite it's general busy-ness and the 'ooh' and 'ahh' stuffing, 'In The Summertime' moves at its own sweet pace with every instrument playing in the key of 'laid back', giving Dorset all the time in the world to tell his tale of good times and good women until he starts babbling like a fool with the happiness of it all - "Sing along with us, dee-dee-dee-dee-dee Da-da-da-da-da, yeah, we're hap-happy Da-da-da-da-dah alright, alright, alright".

True, the "Have a drink, have a drive" lyric is unfortunate to modern ears, but only the most churlish could suggest that the band were advocating drunk driving; after all, Dorset isn't singing 'Have a drink and a drive", and the sheer positive hedonism of "When the winter's here, yeah it's party time. Bring a bottle, wear your bright clothes, it'll soon be summertime" shows that no harm is intended to anyone beyond pissing off those who hate to see the young enjoying themselves. All rather timeless.

1970 Christie: Yellow River

For those of us of a certain age, it's hard to divorce the song 'Yellow River' from the television advert from the early seventies that used it's tune and chorus hook to promote the wonders of 'Yellow Pages' - "Let your fingers, do the walking, Yellow Pages". And so on. I used to believe that, much like the New Seekers or Robin Beck, the chart topping song was a re-written widescreen version of the advert itself. But not a bit of it - 'Yellow River' was an original song written and sung by Jeff (not Tony as some would have you believe) Christie with The Tremoloes as his backing band.

Musically, we're back in Edison Lighthouse Anglo power pop mode as Yorkshireman Christie recounts the thoughts of someone finally returning from an unspecified war to their home and lover in Yellow River. It would be very convenient to point to the contemporary war in Vietnam as its inspiration, but the song also talks about 'cannon fire' which suggests something more historical, though this of course could be metaphorical. But whatever, it's this lack of specifics that ensures 'Yellow River' didn't come pre-stamped with a sell by date, making it a song for all ages and all conflicts.

But alas, it's not much use having such ambivalent lyrics if you can't actually understand what's being said. Christie rushes through the verses like he has a train to catch and in a muffled style that sounds like he caught a bullet in the jaw during that war (maybe he was invalided out?) And this coupled with a thin, metallic production that clangs where it should clout means that, like some proto version of a Vic Reeves club singer, you can only make out every third or so word of the verses:

"Pwmf mft guns dfwn the wyris won
Flfmmy glass hythe time hsfcoyme
M gornng back tothu place thtie love yellow river"

And they mumble by until the chorus kicks in, and that's clear enough:

"Yellow river yellow river is in my mind and in my eyes
Yellow river yellow river is in my blood it's the place I love"

And it's a chorus that sells the song, because regardless of any anti-war message it may or may not have, it's pure bubblegum at heart, albeit bubblegum wearing its father's trousers and on that level at least it manages to pull itself clear of the box marked 'period piece'. But only just mind.

1970 England World Cup Squad: Back Home

If there's one thing more annoying than football on the TV, it's football in the charts. Though 'Back Home' wasn't the first football song, the instances of Team X recording a single before embarking on some campaign or other showed a marked increase in it's wake. Very often said team had taken an early bath long before the song left the charts, making the usual 'We're Gonna Win 'Cos We're The Best Ra Ra Ra' message of hubris deflated like a month old balloon.

'Back Home' was England's official Mexico World Cup song. As defending champions with a strong team, they headed off to South America with a definite spring of optimism in their step, which makes it odd that this is such a staid and lumpen affair. With about as much excitement as a rain swept Sunday league game, 'Back Home' has the entire squad mugging along in flat unison and with the forced jollity of an army gangshow tune. In this context this could either be taken as a provocative 'we're off to war' cry to recall the old blitz spirit, or else it's indicative of the stuffy mindset and concept of entertainment that the British establishment still held in 1970.

Either way, it's a dull recording only made interesting by virtue of the "Back home, they'll be watching and waiting, and cheering every move" lyric. Whether by luck or judgement, this simple line does ring rather evocatively in that those 'back home' lucky enough to own a colour TV would have in fact been watching images of sun drenched, day-glo colour that were far removed from the grey, austere, strike affected, power cut ridden Britain of 1970.

That famous photograph of Pele and Moore exchanging shirts shows life on a different planet altogether than the one that hosted the 1966 tournament merely four years previous, and I've no doubt that many burgeoning pop stars who tuned in were just itching to add a bit of that self same colour and glam to our own domestic palette. Their time would come.

1970 Norman Greenbaum: Spirit In The Sky

An incredibly popular and enduring song, Norman Greenbaum's 'Spirit In The Sky' is a remarkably low-fi recording based around a scuzzy guitar, some dusty psychedelic phrases and a one note handclap beat (which I'll come back to later). If Greil Marcus is right and there really was an 'old, weird America', then 'Spirit In The Sky' would soundtrack it just as well as anything that Dylan and The Band cooked up in the Big Pink basement. Because from the off, the song gives off the aura of times past and the imagery of an evangelical dog and pony show riding a covered wagon into a ghost town to make a few converts of the damned.

Not that converting anybody to the righteous path was any great concern of Greenbaum's; 'Spirit In The Sky' was written purely as an exercise to see if he could write a gospel song in the same way that David Byrne wrote 'Psycho Killer' as an exercise in new wave writing. Despite those 'I got a friend in Jesus' lyrics, Greenbaum is no more a holy roller than Byrne is David Berkowitz, but it's the catchy, singalongacampfire tune he fixed his uplifting theme to that has helped seal the song's popularity.

What's interesting to me is that single time stamp beat that runs throughout. It sounds primitive, like someone pounding the floor with one foot, and some commentators have likened it as a bridge from the sixties to the soon to come stomp of glam rock. But this seems rather wide of the mark and looking in the wrong direction - for me, this motif derives more from the primal rhythms of early delta bluesmen who used that thump to drive their songs of sex and terror of judgement day. Examples are legion, but listen to Willie Dixon's 'Walking The Blues' or John Lee Hooker's 'Boogie Chillen' (to which 'Spirit In The Sky' owes no small debt) to hear what I mean. In modern parlance, what is PJ Harvey's fearsome, wide eyed, blues soaked drawl of 'Goodnight' if not Greenbaum's song played at quarter speed and double volume?

And yes it's a popular song to cover, but subsequent versions, including the chart toppers by Dr & The Medics and Gareth Gates, have forsaken it's roots and sped it up to standard rock double time, with the resultant effect being to remove the terror of the blues and make it into a more ear friendly pop song for a white audience who have trouble clapping on anything but the offbeat. Whether you think this improves the song or not is a personal choice, and does it really matter when you're singing along in the pub? But there's no doubt that the original takes it's inspiration from the past far more than it influences the future and has a flaky, not quite there vibe all of it's own. And a pretty weird one at that.

1970 Dana: All Kinds Of Everything

From the intense, to the....not so intense, Dana's 'All Kinds Of Everything' won the Eurovision Song Concert for Ireland for the first time and at an era when winning was still taken as a serious barometer of quality the way the Mercury Prize (pfft) is today. Amongst certain people anyway.

'All Kinds Of Everything' is 'These Foolish Things' as written by Enid Blyton; the 'Snowdrops and daffodils, butterflies and bees, sailboats and fishermen, things of the sea' lyrics are only one step up from a recounting of what little girls are made from. It's winsome and twee to the point of nausea, but Dana has a 'day release from the convent' voice with innocence to burn so laying into her would feel a bit like laying into Bambi. So I'll just say that although it's a pleasant enough melody, I can't help thinking this would have been so much better sung in French. Or at least any Euro language where I didn't know what she was on about.

1970 Simon & Garfunkel: Bridge Over Troubled Water

If 'Wand'rin' Star' was a strange number one, this is in many ways a whole lot stranger - not so much that it has any inherent 'oddity' factor, but simply by virtue of being what it is. Because for starters, the natural home for 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' is on 33rpm, not 45; that is, it's an album track, not a single. Singles are meant to be memorable short, sharp shocks that deliver a quick knockout punch, not a twelve round affair of jabbing and weaving. Ironically, the B side 'Keep The Customer Satisfied' would have made for a 'better' choice of single, being an upbeat and catchy tune that the milkman could whistle after half hearing it once. But like the boxer (HA!) bedding in for a long haul, 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' demands rather more from it's audience.

Building from a simple piano led introduction, 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' spirals to an astonishing crescendo of orchestrated sound that reverberates with the hymn-like intensity of a piano dropped from the gallery of an empty cathedral. Unlike most of the other number ones that will appear on these pages, it's not something to listen to while doing the ironing and it's a difficult track to schedule into any radio play. Put simply, 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' demands your full respect and attention. And at almost five minutes long, it demands rather a lot of it.

And that's another reason why this is an odd number one - you need to listen, but its infamous production is not for the feint hearted. It's a crammed and condensed end product that needs a good hi-fi set up to get anywhere near to how the song sounded in Simon's head. It will literally play absolute merry hell with any cheap system as it booms, bangs and lisps it's way along and god only knows how this must have sounded on the sort of portable, Dansette type record players that were popular at the time. 'Unlistenable' probably comes close (which incidentally is one of my pet theories as to why 'River Deep, Mountain High' tanked on release. But that's another story).

But away from all this is the song itself, and its appeal is not hard fathom. Although there have been assertions that it's merely an addicts ode to heroin, that strikes me as unlikely. The metaphor of the title is a good and malleable one and yes, the lyrics can lend themselves to the interpretation of wanting a Class A crutch, but they are also direct enough for most to have taken them at face value:

"When you're weary, feeling small,
When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all;
I'm on your side. when times get rough
And friends just can't be found,
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down".

Written down cold, the 'You've Got A Friend' vibe seems simple and vapid, but Garfunkel's vocal adds an edge of almost religious fervour to the track, both at the solemnity of the start where he sounds alone in a universe too big to comprehend, and at the close where he howls defiantly into a maelstrom of superior forces with the desperation of a man with a gun to his head. Again, it's an intense performance that demands your ear, and if you listen properly it can leave you breathless.

For me though, the biggest irony is that the message of selflessness and sacrifice did not extend to the duo themselves. Look at that cover. Garfunkel is the true star of the show here but he's nowhere to be seen. Rather than laying down any bridge, Simon, allegedly incredibly pissed at the amount of attention his co-star received for this, has simply concreted over him. It also shows why the partnership had to be dissolved - Simon may have grown weary at his 'sleeping partner' status, but after delivering a statement like this, where else could they possibly have gone?

1970: Lee Marvin: Wand'rin' Star

Any version of Lerner and Loewe's 'Wand'rin' Star' would make for an odd chart topper, but this version is odder than most. Taken from that year's big screen version of it's parent musical 'Paint Your Wagon', the overly misanthropic tone of the lyrics should surely see off any hope of mass appeal at birth, and it's not helped by the fact that this version is 'sung' by hardboiled American actor Lee Marvin, a man with a voice that makes Johnny Cash sound like Jimmy Somerville.

To take us even further into the Twilight Zone, Nelson Riddle's orchestration plays for a good minute and a half before Marvin even starts up. It's hardly something conducive to radio play (yet it kept The Beatles off number one), it's almost as if Marvin is too embarrassed or afraid to open his mouth. And yet his slightly modulated drawl (you can hardly call it singing) understates the quiet resignation of the song and provides the genuine aura of a man destined to never find happiness. It generates the believability that makes this interpretation something greater than novelty:

"Do I know where hell is, hell is in hello
Heaven is goodbye forever, its time for me to go"

I have to confess I've never heard any straight version of this tune other than those that parody Marvin's croak, which shows how completely he made the song his own. I can also confess I can't imagine any other singer - Tom Waits excepted - delivering those lines with the same pathos but absence of self pity than Marvin manages. A strange number one maybe, but it's a good type of strangeness.

1970 Edison Lighthouse: Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)

Proof positive, should any be needed, that cultural decades pay little heed to the calendar - though it kicked off the Seventies,'Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)' and it's titular character are as mid sixties as anything bearing that actual date stamp.

"She ain't got no money, her clothes are kinda funny, her hair is kinda wild and free"- how times change. If Rosemary behaved like that today then she'd have her windows put through and 'WITCH' scrawled on her door by the local chavs. But it's still interesting that such hippy ideals were still being pedalled and swallowed in the new decade as still something to aspire to, not least in the wake of the previous month's Altamont concert and Charlie's Family, events that made this naively out of time before it was even released.

Then again, being a strictly studio, all British ensemble with the ever prolific Tony Burrows on lead vocals, Edison Lighthouse were never going to find themselves on the cutting edge of anything. 'Love Grows' is a provincial take on the sort of American pop The Turtles found success with but with none of the underlying counterculture links to add credibility.

Essentially a bunch of chancers (Burrows also sang with The Flowerpot Men who themselves provided an approximation of what was going on over in Haight Asbury), Edison Lighthouse produced straight pop in a flowery frock that was to the music of the summer of love what a bloke in a monkey suit is to a real monkey. 'Love Grows' is a catchy chorus milked for all it's worth, but running at barely two and a half minutes, it knows when to stop and is all the more listenable because of it.