Best Song: Gene Pitney - Princess In Rags
There were a lot of candidates for best song and I kept changing my mind on what it should be. In the end I settled for this Gene Pitney record. I always have to sing along when I hear this record. It's quite uplifting despite it's sad lyrical content.
Worst Song: Tony Bennett - The Very Thought Of You
At this point in time we'd had The Beatles push out the old and bring in the new and even the new was old by 1965. Which raises the question how the hell was 50s crooner Tony Bennett still having hits? His Top 40 career sort of ended after this record, though he returned in the 21st century.
Top 40 Review
The Beatles scored their 3rd Christmas number one in a row in 1965. They had taken more of a folk rock direction by this point. Fellow Merseybeat band The Searchers had done the same but less successfully. Both records are decent though.
There were a couple of Beatles covers in there too. A spoken version of "A Hard Days Night" by Peter Sellers and a chamber pop version of "Yesterday" by Matt Monro. Neither of them get points.
Folk rock pioneer Bob Dylan made his Top 40 debut in 1965 and was in the Top 40 at Christmas with "Positively 4th Street" which is a decent record.
The Rolling Stones had "Get Off Of My Cloud" which is a record of theirs I've always liked. Sticking with the blues rock theme we have "It's My Life" by The Animals which is another decent record.
Otis Redding made his chart debut with "My Girl", the same record made famous by The Temptations. Not as good as The Temptations version but I still like it. The same can be said of all the other soul records in this Top 40.
Ken Dodd had the biggest selling single of 1965 with "Tears" which was still in the Top 40 at this point. He also had another record in the Top 40 with "The River". No points for either of those.
There was the ever familiar Cliff Richard having a Top 40 hit at Christmas that gets no points. There were no actual Christmas record in the Top 40 though.
Overall the Christmas charts looks more like a progression of the 60s which we've seen from the best year search got better as the decade went on. More than half the records in this Top 40 got full marks and there was those with half marks too which means we have a very decent score.
Score: 24.5
Table
The 60s post-Beatles debuting are completely contadicting my theory of the charts taking a nosedive at Christmas with 1965 sitting at the top:
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