Best Song: Wayne Gibson - Under My Thumb
This was a cover of a Rolling Stones song from 1966 which was also covered in 1966 and failed to charts. It gained popularity in the 70s thanks to the Northern Soul scene and then it finally made the Top 40. If I was a youth in the 70s then I think Northern Soul would have been my thing
Worst Song: Ralph McTell - Streets Of London
My reason for picking this as the worst song is more of a personal one if I'm honest. As a general rule I didn't like anything we had to sing in school assembly and this was a song we had to sing in school assembly. The whole concept of hundreds of school children singing along to the teachers piano is awful, but the actual song does little to convince me that it's any good.
Top 40 Review
In the best year search 1974 was found to be on a par with 1976. The Christmas charts of 1976 proved to be better, but then punk was just getting underway. 1974 doesn't have that luxury, so how do the Christmas charts fare?
In terms of Christmas music there were 5 records in total. The Christmas number one was "Lonely This Christmas" by Mud. Gilbert O'Sullivan had "Christmas Song" which was his own composition rather than the one made famous by Nat 'King' Cole. The was the long forgotten "Hey Mister Christmas" by Showaddywaddy and there were the novelty hits "Wombling Merry Christmas" by the Wombles and "Father Christmas Do Not Touch Me" by the Goodies.
There was more soul music than any other genre in the charts and I'm including Northern Soul in that. It was however in the lower reaches of the charts with the highest record being "Sha-La-La (Make Me Happy)" at number 20. There wasn't a bad record from those though and specifically with the Northern Soul records it's full marks.
On the flip side, glam rock generally speaking isn't my thing and none of the glam rock records in this Top 40 gets any points.
Splitting the records with points and those without, it's precisely a 50/50 split but a number of those records got half marks so we're not getting as high as 20.
You have to go to the lower reaches to find the good stuff though. I listen to number 1 first and number 40 last and by the time I'd got to 27 the score had reached just 6.5 so very much looked like we were on course for a single figure score.
However, there was barely a bad record below 27. Older music was helping via Northern Soul be we also had "Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus" by Jane Birkin And Serge Gainsbourg back in the charts and helping boost the score.
As a result we end up with a score that is comfortably into double figures.
Score: 15.5
Table
Now 1974 tops the leaderboard for Christmas charts and there's no logical reason why the Christmas score should be better than the best year score:
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