What's Another Year

A year had passed since I embarked on my quest, and in that time I had almost made it to the halfway point, owning 435 Number One singles, 603 when including albums or re-releases. Meanwhile 26 more records had made it to the top of the charts.

I was working on a song of my own and searching for lyrical inspiration, so I decided to take a stroll down to Headingley and take in the usual charity shop tour. It had only been a few weeks since I had last taken this route, but past experience told me it was always worth having a quick look.

By the time I got to the British Heart Foundation shop I had written a middle eight, and by the time I left I was in possession of the 971st Number One, With A Little Help From My Friends/Measure Of A Man by Sam & Mark, the latest in a grand tradition of terrible Beatles covers. Measure Of A Man is one of those invisible double A-sides, ignored by radio and TV, though the CD sleeve assured me that it had been performed in the Pop Idol final, which could explain why neither Sam nor Mark won.

The PDSA shelves were still looking bare following my previous raid, but I did find £1 worth of chart-topping hits, namely Boom! Shake The Room by Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince and Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is A Place On Earth, as well as another, unscratched copy of Jim Diamond’s I Should Have Known Better.

The All Aboard shop was, incredibly, open. I overcame my shock at this strange state of affairs and headed inside, where I found a stack of CD singles. It was a relief to find Rock DJ by Robbie Williams having previously bought its empty case. There were two other Number Ones from 2000, Black Legend’s You See The Trouble With Me and Black Coffee by All Saints. The Outhere Brothers sported a Parental Advisory sticker on the cover of Don’t Stop (Wiggle Wiggle), as well as a totally superfluous shout of “Bee-yatch” at the end. I was most pleased to find the one-hit wonder White Town’s Your Woman (alternatively known as ‘Abort, Retry, Fail’), the first Number One by one of the new breed of bedroom musicians who emerged in the late 90s thanks to the wonders of technology.

In the Martin House shop I bought a selection of 7” singles, largely thanks to a certain Gwen Wray, whose name was written on most of my purchases. These were mainly hits from the 1970s, the only exception being the 1969 Number One Sugar Sugar by the Archies (a cartoon band long before Gorillaz). I already had Alvin Stardust’s Jealous Mind and I had bought Dawn's Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree* just a few weeks earlier, but both had been scratched and noisy so I was happy to find replacements. Sadly the Alvin Stardust record was not much of an improvement, and I began to wonder if in fact it was simply a poor recording.

The 353rd and 354th Number Ones, George McCrae’s Rock Your Baby and When Will I See You Again by the Three Degrees, were also a little noisy, but not disastrously so, and thankfully the fantastic You To Me Are Everything by The Real Thing was unafflicted. The sound quality of David Cassidy’s Daydreamer/The Puppy Song was just fine, but both sides of the record, neither of which I had heard before, are awful. Apparently Gwen would disagree to the extent that she had cut out the lyrics of Daydreamer from an unknown source and inserted them inside the sleeve.

My Jive Bunny collection was perfected when I bought replacement copies of Swing The Mood (my other copy skipped) and That’s What I Like (as I had suspected, the 12” version I already had was an extended mix). In addition to all of this I bought a solitary CD, Where Is The Love? by Black Eyed Peas, a great record ruined at the time by constant radio play but now sounding fresh again.

My record hunting had distracted me from my original purpose, and the song remained unfinished, though I had a few half ideas in mind. I declared my shopping trip over and went home to complete what I hoped would be a future Number One.

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* Nine Number Ones have a species of tree in their title, so that should give you plenty to choose from.