The Best Of is a project born of many happy hours in pubs and on walks spent dreaming up greatest hits album titles by artists who are known for one huge, beloved song that outshines all the others in their catalogue.
Call them one-hit wonders, call them signature songs, there’s a story and an artist behind every one. We think they deserve a little more love. Words by Chris Price, pictures by Mike Smith. Enjoy!
So much industry chatter has centred lately on the seemingly endless expansion of powerhouse songwriting teams on modern pop songs.
With APT, the ineluctable K-pop smash by Rosé and Bruno Mars, we might just have hit peak collab. What, you might reasonably ask, can ELEVEN people possibly have contributed to a song that’s less than three minutes in length?
More pressingly, how did septuagenarian songwriters Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, hitherto known for hits by 1970s glam rockers The Sweet and Mud, come to be credited on a 2024 earworm about a South Korean drinking game? The short answer is Mickey by Toni Basil.
Tubthumping was at least one more hit than Chumbawamba ever imagined they would have. By the time the song became a worldwide smash in 1997, the squat-dwelling anarcho-punk collective had spent fifteen years and fully eight albums kicking against the mainstream, a fiercely political band more at home on the picket lines than on Top of the Pops.
It’s a strange quirk of British popular culture that three groups from the early 1970s – Slade, Mud and Wizzard – return unfailingly to the airwaves each December and remind us that fifty years ago there was a thing called glam rock. This platform-heeled triumvirate of power chords, glitter and sleigh bells are colourful remnants of a gaudier time, suspended in aspic by the nostalgia of Christmas. You might think of them as the congealed salads of popular music.
