Junk Box Jury

Taken from the LP ‘Hit Hits’ on (Music For Pleasure MFP 1290) November 1968

In every Hit Parade there are songs which will be remembered long after their first appearance in the charts—some of them may become the standards of tomorrow, to be sung and recorded again and again by many different artists.

The songs on this record are songs of this kind—hits of today whose appeal will not die away as soon as they have vanished from the charts.

As usual, there’s been a strong ballad backbone to the charts recently—Les Reed and Barry Mason came up with yet another winner for Englebert Humperdink in ‘Les Bicyclettes de Belsize’, and Clive Westlake, writer of a string of hits for Dusty Springfield, did the same for Tom Jones with ‘A Minute of Your Time’.

‘1, 2, 3 O’Leary’ was a song with an old-time appeal, as was ‘May I Have the Next Dream with You’, but this introduced a young singer to the charts, Malcolm Roberts.

The Foundations “Build Me Up Buttercup”

Lulu ate up the charts in her usual style with ‘I’m a Tiger’; Leapy Lee, no newcomer to the entertainment scene, scored his first pop success with ‘Little Arrows’; and ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’ provided the Foundations with the hit they’d been looking for since ‘Now That I’ve Found You’.

Lily the Pink’s Medicinal Compound did wonders for the Scaffold, and a fresh composition from the Beatles which they sang on their double LP was ‘Birthday’.

A song which well deserved reviving was ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’, which was written in 1931 but became a hit all over again when Mama Cass sang it, backed by the remaining three members of the Mama’s and Papa’s.

Another song from the States was ‘Harper Valley PTA’—as soon as we learned that ‘PTA’ stood for ‘Parent-Teacher Association’, and that Jeannie C. Riley was singing about a PTA that would have been a disgrace to Peyton Place, we sent this jaunty country-style song racing up the charts.

But the pop fairy-tale of the year was Mary Hopkin‘s rise from the seclusion of Pontardawe via ‘Opportunity Knocks’ and Twiggy to a huge hit with the Paul McCartney-produced ‘Those Were the Days’, a song with a fresh and simple sound that marked it out straight away from the usual product of the pop industry.

On this LP these lasting hits have been recreated in stereo by studio musicians—you will find that they have lost none of the appeal that originally brought them into the Hit Parade. (Blase Machin).

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cost of record: £1
bought from: charity shop