Photograph: Pictorial Press/Alamy 95 The Buggles – Video Killed the Radio Star (1979) Postmodern gold … Duo Geoff Downes and Trevor Horn of the Buggles. The pinnacle of Roy Orbison’s career as rock’s great tragedian: three astonishing, inconsolable minutes during which stars cry, rainbows weep, golden days are sorrowfully recalled and drums beat a leaden funeral march, before it all reaches a terrible climax, Orbison desperately repeating the title as if misery is a kind of catharsis. If you wanted evidence of how far out, how unbound by the usual rules reggae was, you could find it at the top of the charts in early 1971: a piano line taken – sampled if you like – from Ramsey Lewis a vocalist who largely grunted and bellowed incomprehensibly in the style of a Jamaican deejay: “I am the magnificent W-O-O-O!” It still sounds fantastic. AP 97 Dave and Ansell Collins – Double Barrel (1971) The weirdness of 70s Britain in musical form. Recorded in a Coventry front room, Mouldy Old Dough sounds like pop music made by people who have never actually heard pop music, but have had it described to them by someone who didn’t really know what they were talking about: pub piano, growled vocals, a beat that recalls a drunk doggedly staggering home. LS 98 Lieutenant Pigeon – Mouldy Old Dough (1972) As much a generational bellwether as a pop classic. While she weathered accusations of appropriation for disavowing hip-hop cliches in her obviously rap-influenced delivery, she ultimately echoed the genre’s own move towards unvarnished portrayals of teenage disaffection instigated by a parallel wave of SoundCloud upstarts. Photograph: Victoria Will/Invision/AP 99 Lorde – Royals (2013)īy disavowing the hollow opulence and bloated scale of pop’s reigning class, Lorde accidentally ushered in a brand new one: there would be no Billie Eilish if not for her conspiratorial incantations. Generational bellwether … New Zealand singer Lorde, AKA Ella Yelich-O’Connor, in 2013. Rock Around the Clock patently isn’t it, but it was, incontrovertibly, the record that brought rock’n’roll to mainstream attention in the UK: two minutes of music that sounded infinitely more feral than its avuncular artist looked and that changed pop music for ever. You could spend years arguing about what constitutes the first rock’n’roll record. Also, note that dates listed are the dates the songs reached No 1.īen Beaumont-Thomas, music editor 100 Bill Haley and His Comets – Rock Around the Clock (1955)
After we’ve reached No 1, we’ll ask what you think we unforgivably missed out from the overall list, and then publish highlights from your selections. We’d love to hear what you think of our choices – whether in agreement or outrage – and hear your fond or not-so-fond memories of these singles. The only rule was that an artist could only feature once.Īs such, it is very much open to discussion, which we heartily encourage in the comments section. The ranking isn’t based on sales or longevity, it’s the fruit of that discussion: what we as critics, fans and lifetime listeners think are the most brilliant songs to top the UK charts, and, of those, which are more brilliant than others. This list, and the songs’ order, was compiled via a politely raging video call between me, chief rock and pop critic Alexis Petridis and deputy music editor Laura Snapes. That takes us up to the Top 20, and from Monday to Friday for four weeks we’ll have standalone celebrations of each remaining song by our team of critics. We’ll be counting this down over six weeks – for the first two weeks, we’ll spend Monday to Thursday counting down 10 at a time. We present to you a ranking of the 100 greatest UK No 1 singles since the charts began in 1952. A s the coronavirus lockdown continues, the Guardian’s music desk thought you might be in need of a distraction – something to send you down memory lane, or to divert the annoyance at your housemates or children on to us.
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