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.

1980 turned out to be a bumper year for Christmas singles that doubled as anti-war songs, but for tragic and unexpected reasons. Following the top 20 success that summer of his single You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties, Jona Lewie’s unusual Christmas offering Stop The Cavalry, with all its homespun, new wave-meets-Dad’s Army charm, was released on Nov 21.

“You have so many relationships in this life, only one or two will last,” goes the unexpectedly sombre opening line of 1997’s bouncy and inescapable teen smash MMMBop. “You go through all the pain and strife, then you turn your back and they’re gone so fast.” In a post-grunge, post-Cobain era, maybe the world needed its existential angst repackaged in the form of saccharine-sweet plaid-clad doo-wop. Taylor Hanson even looked like a young Kurt.

For a one-hit wonder, Trevor Horn has had an awful lot of hits. One half of late 70’s new wave studio band The Buggles, Horn might be the only artist in our series who was actually trying to have just one hit – after all, he only needed one. As he told the Independent in 2004, the aspiring producer was in a catch-22: “I couldn’t have a hit without a decent artist, and I couldn’t work with any decent artists without having had a hit.”So he took matters into his own hands.

The list of break-up duets is, as you might expect, pretty short. Break-up songs? Ten a penny. Duets? Where to start! But break-up duets? Not so many. Don’t You Want Me by The Human League; Broken Strings by James Morrison & Nelly Furtado; Fairytale of New York at a push. But the break-up duet to end all break-up duets? Somebody That I Used To Know by Gotye featuring Kimbra.

Pop music is littered with cautionary tales about the perils of child stardom and Musical Youth, a reggae-pop outfit comprising five Brummie-Jamaican school friends who conquered America and became the first black artists to be played on MTV, is one well worth heeding.

Achy Breaky Heart. Line dancing. Miley Cyrus. It’s hard to know which of the cowboy-booted, cosmos-transforming pop phenomena spawned from the creative and procreative loins of one man – Flatwoods, Kentucky’s favourite son Billy Ray Cyrus – has had the most culture-shifting impact on the world*. That’s more pop phenomena (three) than Achy Breaky Heart has chords (two).

If a dopamine hit in 2024 is a red dot in your IG notifications, for a period in the early 90’s that sense of anticipation took the form of a sound: five seconds of rising guitar feedback followed by a cymbal stab heralding the arrival of flaxen-haired pop cherub Chesney Hawkes and his unmistakable, unfakeable, unshakeable declaration of teen agency: “I aaaam the one and only!”

When wife-and-husband team Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, aka new wave collective and Talking Heads side project Tom Tom Club, emerged from their Bahamian studio session with 1981’s seminal Genius of Love, they had no idea it would become one of the most iconic, most sampled, most ripped-off beats in hip-hop and R&B.

For a debut single that transmogrified an Aussie soap actress into an overnight global pop sensation, Torn had already put in serious hard yards by the time Imbruglia scored its most spectacular touchdown in 1997. Originally written for LA post-grunge band Ednaswap, Torn was first recorded in Danish by Lis Sørensen, the singer of a pop-rock group called – we shit you not – Shit & Chanel. In 1996 it was a minor hit in Norway for Trine Reine.

It’s well known that the bassline for Ice Ice Baby, Vanilla Ice’s gargantuan and unavoidable 1990 debut, is lifted wholesale from Queen and David Bowie’s 1981 single Under Pressure. Long after IIB became a hit, Messrs Mercury, May, Taylor and Bowie threatened legal action, eventually settling out of court for an undisclosed sum that approximates to “most of the money”.

How to explain Gen Z’s obsession with Africa, Toto’s pillow-soft yacht rock meme-weaver that became an analogue anthem for the digital age? Laden with yearning for an entire continent the band had never visited, it’s a curious candidate for veneration by a generation unforgiving of white men who “bless the rains down in Africa”.