Noddy holder

“Merry Xmas, Everybody” No.1, 1973 Slade’s chart-topper was recorded in New York while the band toured the world. Flamboyant guitarist, Dave Hill – remembered for his trademark high-heel boots and dis

The most successful Christmas song of all time, Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody was a much-needed pick-me-up for a nation crippled by a three-day working week

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→ For 40 years, George Michael’s Last Christmas was the bridesmaid. The nearly-but-never-quite. The most successful single never to reach number one, it was pop’s great injustice. And then the spell b

Fifty years on from their first successes, Roger McGuinn, the 12-string architect of THE BYRDS , tells Uncut about their exceptional first 18 months – and his relationship with Gene Clark. As the young group make their jet-powered escape from the folk think tank, we hear about making the scene on the Strip, outraging Iowa and a muted response in the United Kingdom. But ultimately how “Eight Miles High” became the spectacular conclusion of the band’s first era. “I almost left The Byrds entirely to go and be in this space band With Dino Valente,” McGuinn tells John Robinson

It was 1965 with bells on, the year the singles charts got wilder, heavier, druggier. Twelve months of traumas, transgressions and transvestism, experiments and explosions. How 20 revolutionary platters from 1966 revealed "the secrets of space and time". "Intensity was the keynote," says JON SAVAGE.