Best Song: The Small Faces - Tin Soldier
When the internet allowed me to easily educate myself on music from the 60s, one band that stood out to me as being particularly good was The Small Faces. This is possibly my favourite record of theirs. It features PP Arnold on vocals, who also provided vocals for rave tunes years later. Maybe there's something in that.
Worst Song: Shirley Bassey - Big Spender
A question that I always get wrong on Popmaster is when they play a clip of this and you need to name the musical it's from. In fact I could say the same for several songs from musicals. I hate musicals and that's mainly to do with the rubbish music you often find in them.
Top 40 Review
After Tom Jones scored the Christmas number one in 1966 he had competition from The Beatles to achieve the same in 1967. In fact he was up against 2 Beatles records and ended up at number 3 with The Beatles occupying the Top 2.
Paul wasn't the only member of the McCartney family in this Top 40. His comedian brother Mike was in the Top 40 as part of The Scaffold with the novelty record "Thank U Very Much".
As a general rule with this Top 40 if a record sounds like it's from 1967 then it gets points. If it sounds more like it was from 1957 then it doesn't get points, and there are quite a few of those.
It goes without saying that the obligatory Cliff Richard hit fits that latter category. We also quite surprisingly have 2 hits in there for Frankie Vaughan who was even old hat in 1957.
Although he made his Top 40 debut in 1967 I also consider Engelbert Humperdinck to fit that category. His biggest hit "Release Me" was there and also his other number one "The Last Waltz". Additionally there was a French version of the latter by Mireille Mathieu called "La Derniere Valse".
In terms of the more 1967 sounding records, we had Motown hits from The Four Tops and The Supremes which both score full marks as usual. We have other soul records from Sam & Dave, Brenton Wood and Felice Taylor plus some British soul from The Foundations with "Baby, Now That I've Found You", all good records.
There were 2 records from The Bee Gees with "World" and "Massachusetts". I like this era of The Bee Gees, it's very different to their disco era and much better in my opinion.
We had the last Top 10 hit from Gene Pitney with "Somethings Gotten Hold Of My Heart" which is a great record.
As this was a 1967 chart that could have really been any time of the year and I'm finding myself liking the 1967 sounding music, we end up with a really good score.
Score: 24.5
Table
1967 is joint top and better than the best year score. It certainly seems the Christmas charts didn't take a nosedive in the 60s, quite the opposite:
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