#284: Round Round by Jonathan King
Peak Month: May 1967
10 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #2
1 week Hit Bound
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube: “Round Round”
Lyrics: “Round Round”
Born in 1944 in the West End of London as Kenneth George King, and was sent to pre-prep school from the age of three. When he was 8-years-old King went to boarding school. When he was nine, his father died of a heart attack. He became fascinated with live theatre and bought his first 78 RPM in 1956 which was Guy Mitchell’s “Singing The Blues”. He became enthralled with pop music as he listened to Buddy Holly, Adam Faith and others. King recalled later “Since ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’ swept me off my feet, I had become a raving pop addict, desperate for a fix every few seconds. I kept thick notebooks packed with copies of the weekly charts, adverts for new products, pages of predictions of future hits, reviews and comments about current artistes. Looking at them now, there was no way I could ever have avoided a future in the music industry.”
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#1252: Chocolate Cake by Crowded House
Peak Month: August 1991
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #15
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube: “Chocolate Cake”
Lyrics: “Chocolate Cake”
Neil Mullane Finn was born in 1958 in Te Awamutu on the North Island of New Zealand. His brother Brian Timothy Finn was born in the same New Zealand town in 1952. Neil began playing guitar when he was eight-years-old, and decided to be a professional musician at age 12. Tim Finn learned to play guitar, drums and piano. In 1972, when Tim was 20 and Neil was 14, the Finn brothers co-founded the rock band Split Enz. Over time the band shifted their sound to New Wave and Art Rock. With Split Enz they enjoyed international hits that included “One Step Ahead“, “I Got You”, and “Six Months In A Leaky Boat”.
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#285: Delilah by Tom Jones
Peak Month: May 1968
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #1
1 week Hit Bound
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #15
YouTube: “Delilah”
Lyrics: “Delilah”
Thomas John Woodward was born in Wales in 1940. His father was a coal miner. Young Tom began singing at an early age and was in a children’s choir. At age 12 he had tuberculosis. While convalescing he spent more time developing an interest in music and listening to records. In 1963 he was the lead singer for the Welsh band Tommy Scott and the Senators. They had a record made with Tornados producer Joe Meek. In 1964 Jones was heard by a manager in the music industry based in London. Jones was brought to London and renamed Tom Jones. This was a strategy to get his attention after the successful musical Tom Jones won four Academy Awards in 1963, including Best Director and Best Picture.
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#292: Here Comes My Baby by the Tremeloes
Peak Month: May 1967
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #1
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #13
YouTube: “Here Comes My Baby”
Lyrics: “Here Comes My Baby”
In 1956 at Park Modern Secondary School in Barking, Essex, two school mates, Brian Poole and Alan Blakley, started a band. On family holidays together, they’d tell their parents about their dreams of being on TV. They learned a couple of tunes by Buddy Holly and Everly Brothers, got two acoustic Hofner guitars, and asked their saxophone and bass playing school mate, Alan Howard to join them. Once they started performing at local parties, they met drummer Dave Munden, who soon joined them. Soon Alan Blakley, Dave Munden and Brian Poole found that they could harmonise any song they wanted to and developed a style of their own, with all of them singing and playing and Alan Howard on bass guitar. At this time they did not have a name but soon opted for Tremilos after the sound on the new amplifiers which they could not yet afford. In time, the lead guitarist from Joe & The Teems, Ricky West (born Richard Westwood), was added to the band in 1960.
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#1205: Sandra by Idle Eyes
Peak Month: October 1986
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #16
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube: “Sandra”
Lyrics: “Sandra”
Tad Campbell was born in Vancouver (BC). After high school he found himself in Australia moonlighting for a band called the Daydream Islanders between shifts while working for a luxury liner that cruised around parts of the continent. In 1980 he replied to an ad looking for a guitarist, and ended up with the band playing for months at a resort in the Whitsunday Islands. A chambermaid at a hotel Campbell knew, Donna McConville, became the bands’ lead singer. Though they had other Australian musicians in the line-up, when Campbell and McConville decided to move to Vancouver, the other bandmates chose not to follow. Back in Vancouver the pair got a new lineup and called themselves Idle Eyes. But the lineup kept changing. Tad Campbell recalls that “their first tour was cancelled when the drummer backed out the day they were supposed to leave.” Part of the problem was that Idle Eyes was made up almost entirely of bandmates from New Zealand and Australia who had visa issues. Eventually, Donna McConville returned to Australia and became a backing singer for John Farnham.
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#293: Next Plane To London by Rose Garden
Peak Month: November 1967
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #2
1 week Hit Bound
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #17
YouTube: “Next Plane To London”
Lyrics: “Next Plane To London”
In 1964, a couple of students at a local Los Angeles high school discovered their mutual interest in making music. All born around 1949-1950, John Noreen and Jim Groshong both played guitar. Bill Fleming played bass guitar and Bruce Bowdin was a drummer. They decided to form a band and named themselves the Blokes. A ‘bloke’ is British slang for ‘an ordinary guy, man.’ Noreen, Groshong and the others chose their name after a British slang word, hoping to get in on the musical craze surrounding the British Invasion in ’64.
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#294: I’m Still Searching by Glass Tiger
Peak Month: May-June 1988
14 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #4
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #31
YouTube: “I’m Still Searching”
Lyrics: “I’m Still Searching”
Discovered in the summer of 1984 when a band from Newmarket, Ontario called Tokyo spent two evenings performing before capacity crowds at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens opening for Boy George and Culture Club. Their dynamic original sound captured the moment, and the race to sign them was on. Tokyo, which had become a major force in suburban high schools and the Ontario club circuit, officially became Glass Tiger early the following year when a record deal was finally signed with Capitol Records. The band consisted of Alan Frew on vocals and guitar, Sam Reid on keyboards, Al Connelly on guitar, Wayne Parker on bass and Michael Hanson on drums.
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#295: I Missed Again by Phil Collins
Peak Month: May 1981
13 weeks on Vancouver’s CFUN chart
Peak Position #2
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #19
YouTube: “I Missed Again”
Lyrics: “I Missed Again”
Philip “Phil” Collins was born in 1951 in Middlesex, England. From the age of five he began to play drums. He never learned to read and write conventional musical notation, and instead used a system he devised himself. He later regretted this, saying: “I never really came to grips with the music. I should have stuck with it. I’ve always felt that if I could hum it, I could play it. For me, that was good enough, but that attitude is bad. He formed a band at the age of 14, and was an extra in the Beatles film A Hard Days Night. Collins played one of the screaming teenagers in the audience for a concert at a TV station. In 1967 Collins played a lead role as one of Farmer Grant’s children in the film Calamity the Cow. Also in 1967, he acted in a scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, where children storm a castle, but the scene was cut to shorten the film.
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#1240: Almost Unreal by Roxette
Peak Month: July 1993
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #14
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #94
YouTube: “Almost Unreal”
Lyrics: “Almost Unreal”
Roxette was a duo composed of Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle. Gun-Marie Fredriksson was born in 1958 in a small town in the southern tip of Sweden. When she was seven-years-old, her 20-year-old sister died in a traffic fatality. She remembers the support she got to pursue music from a young age from attending a church. Fredriksson recalls she had been performing “ever since I was little and me and my sister Tina went to Sunday school. We had a wonderful pastor in Östra Ljungby. I’ve got really bright, lovely memories of that place, even when my big sister died. I loved all the songs. It was such a source of freedom for me… for both of us.” At age 17, she enrolled in a music school, and was subsequently cast in a musical that toured across Sweden.
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#296: Live by the Merry-Go-Round
Peak Month: May 1967
8 weeks on Vancouver’s CKLG chart
Peak Position #1
1 week Hit Bound
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #63
YouTube: “Live”
Lyrics: “Live”
Joel Larson was born in San Francisco in 1947 and learned to play drums at the age of 12. During high school he played in a number of bands who performed in clubs. When he was 18 years old, Larson joined a San Mateo band called The Bedouins who won a 1965 Battle of the Bands event in that city. The Bedouins were invited to audition at the San Francisco Whisky A Go Go. The nightclub owner, Elmer Valentine, had asked Dunhill Record owner, Lou Adler, to attend the audition. Adler was impressed and soon The Bedouins were renamed The Grass Roots and given a new folk rock sound. While with The Grass Roots, Larson’s band were the studio musicians playing back-up to Barry McGuire’s #1 hit “Eve Of Destruction”. In 1966 The Grass Roots had a Top 30 hit in the USA called “Where Were You When I Needed You”, which only got play listed below the Top 40 in Vancouver for the last week of May 1966.
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