My Best Tunes

They called them the Swinging Sixties, so it comes as no surprise that there are four Beatles singles in the top five in a new compilation of the best-selling singles of the decade.

When the makers of Glee announced that they were taking their show on the road for an all-singing and dancing extravaganza featuring some of the hit drama’s best-loved covers, it was hard not to feel slightly underwhelmed.

They called them the Swinging Sixties, so it comes as no surprise that there are four Beatles singles in the top five in a new compilation of the best-selling singles of the decade.

When the makers of Glee announced that they were taking their show on the road for an all-singing and dancing extravaganza featuring some of the hit drama’s best-loved covers, it was hard not to feel slightly underwhelmed.

Josh Dubovie said he was “still smiling” today after suffering the humiliation of coming last in the Eurovision Song Contest.

He’s depicted, on the front, as a cross between a bourgeois Magritte pipe-smoker and a Pythonesque Minister of Silly Walks caught in a sex scandal.

Cibelle Cavalli, reputedly stellar in her native Brazil, now resides in London’s Shoreditch where she is a purveyor of “tropical punk” (her term).

The two albums by the ex-Ornette Coleman alumni-group Old and New Dreams are justly celebrated, but they’re entirely outshone in this superb five-disc box-set by three relative obscurities:

Teenage Fanclub are a trusty old basset hound of a band now, regarded affectionately by indie fans of a certain age but incapable of new tricks.

A large and diverse “soul” agglomeration of dudes in Milwaukee, delving into the rhythm and texture of pre-disco R&B. Curtis Mayfield is the most obvious influence, not least for the percussive grooves and floaty falsetto lead voice.