Sandie Shaw scored her last of her eight Top Ten hits with her 21st single, Monsieur Dupont, in 1969.

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The Flirtations are one of those bands who left their native USA to find success in the UK… and then became even bigger back in America.

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Here’s a ’60s band I’ve never heard of before, a female-fronted outfit with the disappointingly humdrum name of Smith, with their solitary hit single – a cover of Baby It’s You.

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The Bee Gees song written for Otis Redding but redone as a hippie country-soul heartbreaker. Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers, give it a country twang replete with pedal steel guitar that was entirely absent from the original.

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This is a fantastic discovery If you like funky horn sections and you like powerful female voices. They don’t come much more powerful than Lydia Pense and her San Francisco-based band Cold Blood.

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This song is such a masterpiece with which to launch a career. And Donny Hathaway is rightly regarded as one of the greatest of all soul singers.

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Cream’s original version of this song was played a lot when I was at school, driven along by a bassline Jack Bruce apparently inspired by seeing a Hendrix concert. It was only much later that I heard this funky soul version by Spanky Wilson, with its exuberant horns and serpentine basslines.

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Like great novels, great songs often have their roots in real life. But I never knew that was the case with Suspicious Minds.

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I was busy building tree houses and playing with train sets when The Stooges released their debut album so I can only imagine the impact of hearing this when it came out. No need to say when that was either – it’s right there in the title.

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This is, and always has been since I first heard it, my favourite song of all time. It’s just perfect in its simplicity: wistful, dreamy, mournful and melancholic.

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