1. Mr Acker Bilk – Stranger on the Shore. Unexpected things keep popping up on the charts. This time it’s a throwback to 1930s balladry, with a slow, romantic, rhythmically fluid melody and a book-chik guitar accompaniment buried deep below a lush string section. Instead of Judy Garland, though, we have the bowler-hatted, mustachioed British clarinetist Mr Acker Bilk, whose rich, warm, expressive style reminds me of Coleman Hawkins doing “Body and Soul.” It’s beautiful, but it’s so far from the dominant styles of early 60s pop music that it’s hard to imagine how it became #1 — or so I thought until I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it was used as the theme for a BBC TV drama of the same name.

2. Ray Charles – I Can’t Stop Loving You. Obviously something was in the air in 1962, because here’s another retro song, again with boom-chik guitar part and string section, plus a pure-vowelled, high-sopranoed backing choir that wouldn’t feel too out of place in a Bing Crosby song. The retro effect is reinforced by the fact that the choir is recorded in mono — something which I assume was done specifically for that reason, since everyone else seems to have been recorded in stereo. Charles’s vocals and piano playing, by contrast, are modern, one part soul and one part lounge. Unfortunately, stylistic juxtaposition aside, I can’t say I find the song all that interesting.

3. Dee Dee Sharp – Mashed Potato Time. I like self-referential songs, and that includes songs about the dance you’re supposed to do to them. But this one is particularly loopy because it’s about how the Mashed Potato has been popular for a while, and how the kids like to find songs they can dance it to. Every verse ends with the name of another song, and every chorus includes some dopey reference to that song. For example: “They discovered it’s the most, man / The day they did it to ‘Please Mr. Postman’” — followed by “Mashed Potato, deliver the letter, yeah.” Another time it’s “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and “Mashed Potato, a-weema-weh, a weema-weh” (or however you spell that). It’s also got the word “boss” and an early instance of the word “groovy.” Musically, it’s pure doo-wop, with repeated piano chords, nonsensical backing vocals, a I-vi-IV-V progression and a bassline that could practically come from a Casio keyboard preset. Sharp’s got a bit of a Wanda-Jackson-ish country twang, though. Fun stuff.

4. Bobby Vinton – Roses Are Red. This is an odd one, especially compared to the other Bobby Vinton song I’m familiar with, “Blue Velvet.” First of all, there’s the arrangement: Vinton’s voice mixed high in the center, with all the accompanying instruments much quieter and panned way to either side: bass and tinkling saloon piano on the right, loping acoustic guitar, backing vocals, and occasional strings on the left. Then there’s the rhythm, which sometimes skips two beats so that the chorus is underway before you quite realize the verse has ended. Then there’s Vinton’s bizarre, Shatneresque pauses: “She looks … a lot like you,” “And when the …. big day came,” etc. And of course there’s Vinton’s voice, which has an Uncanny Valley quality a bit like Frankie Avalon‘s, although I don’t like him nearly as much. And all of this is in support of a love song addressed to an old high school sweetheart who’s now married to someone else and has a kid — a kid who looks a lot like her, so much so in fact that someday a boy will write sweet things in her yearbook too. What are we supposed to be focusing on here: Teen pathos? Adult regret? Both at once? Either way, the music seems pretty much completely unrelated to the feelings the words are trying to convey.

5. David Rose – The Stripper. Here we have yet another song in an older style, namely big band – but a trashy, garish, exaggerated, overintensified version of the big band, as if the music were strutting on its long trombone legs, wiggling its drum-set ass, sticking out its long trumpet tongue at the audience. I’m not just saying that because of the title: the song’s heavy drums, trombone glissandi and timbral density are obviously meant to evoke burlesque. When I look at it in the context of a year when three of the top five songs are in retro styles, and a fourth is about a dance you can do to a bunch of hits from years past, I feel like this is big band reimagined for an era on the edge of a musical crisis, a time when people are looking for a new sound but don’t know about the rock explosion that’s coming up in a few years, so they turn to the past, only to find that it’s become a gaudy parody of itself, drained of its old meaning, reduced to playing a stripper in a dingy low-rent theater. This reading is based on a pretty reductive reading of pop music history — but makes for good listening!