The 100 greatest singles of all time: Our critic ranks the classics, from 1960s chart-toppers to new pop bangers... so does YOUR favourite song make the cut?

Pop classics, soulful ballads and 80s smash hits all feature in pop critic Tim De Lisle's pick of the 100 greatest singles.

Our music expert has chosen all the best songs to listen to over the Easter weekend, sifting through thousands of options so you don't have to.

From the likes of George Michael, Whitney Houston, David Bowie and Billie Eilish to The Beatles, he's ranked them all. 

Read on to find out what to listen to this weekend and which song takes top spot...

100

Lust For Life - Iggy Pop

1977, did not chart; 1996, No 26

Some songs are just made to get the party started – even if it takes them nearly 20 years. Lust For Life, co-written by Iggy’s good friend David Bowie, was always a pulsating rock song, but it only became a classic when Danny Boyle used it to set the tone in Trainspotting. 

It takes a feel-good rhythm from Tamla Motown and adds some feel-bad imagery from the novelist William Burroughs. It radiates lovable menace and an invincible vitality, which was needed when it was dragged into a TV commercial for Royal Caribbean Cruises.

99

Running Up That Hill - Kate Bush

1985, No 3; 2012, No 6; 2022, No 1

Kate Bush has it all: a glorious voice, a distinctive vision, the confidence to write a song without forming a committee and the ability to interpret her own work with proper dance moves. Running Up That Hill is a typically singular single, arguing that men and women should be able to walk a mile in each other’s shoes. 

With its galloping rhythm and beguiling hook, it would have made a memorable No 1, but its path was blocked by another budding classic (Madonna’s Into The Groove) and a remake of an old chestnut (UB40 and Chrissie Hynde’s version of I Got You Babe). Running Up That Hill finally topped the chart 37 years later, after featuring in a big Netflix series. Stranger Things have happened, but not many.

98

That'll Be The Day - Buddy Holly & The Crickets

1957, No 1

The founding fathers of rock ’n’ roll don’t sell many records these days, but we are still deep in their debt. The youngest of them, Buddy Holly, died in a plane crash at the age of 22, but he had already paved the way from rock to pop with his swinging succinctness. 

His voice was both genial and dynamic, rocking like a rhythm guitar. His many fans included a few giants: Bob Dylan saw Holly in concert two days before he died, and Paul McCartney liked him so much he bought the rights to his songs.

97

Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me - George Michael and Elton John

1991, No 1

Two beloved balladeers for the price of one. A pop star can be a lost soul, and Bernie Taupin captured it in one of his sharpest lines – ‘although I search myself, it’s always someone else I see’. This duet, recorded live at Wembley Arena, took a great song and made it even better.

96

…Baby One More Time - Britney Spears

1998, No 1

These days the words masked by those dots (‘Hit me’) wouldn’t get past the censors, but a pop song, like a cartoon, should have some licence. And in every other way Britney’s first hit, made in Sweden by Max Martin, is a classic, crackling with electricity.

95

Another Brick In The Wall Pt.2 - Pink Floyd

1979, No 1

Lugubrious middle-class prog-rockers having a crack at disco: it should have been a disaster. But then came that bassline… and a choir of schoolchildren cheerfully singing ‘We don’t need no education’. In a vintage year for singles, this was the Christmas No 1.

94 

Bad Guy - Billie Eilish

2019, No 2

Many of today’s hits are highly calculated – written by committee and targeted at algorithms. Bad Guy is the opposite: the sound of a teenager and her brother playing around on their laptops and coming up with something urgent, messy and utterly alive. Its global sales were greater than any other single of 2019, which suggests there’s hope for us yet.

93

Yes - McAlmont & Butler

1995, No 8

David McAlmont is one of the great underrated singers, an emotional powerhouse in the same league as Dusty Springfield. Bernard Butler is the guitarist from Suede who has become everybody’s favourite collaborator. Together they conjured up four minutes of sheer exhilaration.

92

Stronger - Kanye West

2007, No 1

When Kanye was good, he was very good. And he didn’t always realise it: he was so unsure that he’d nailed this hip-hop-disco hybrid that he is said to have mixed it 75 times. The version he released as a single took Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger and made it slower, bolder, sharper, warmer.

91

Total Control - The Motels

1979, did not chart

A song so little-known that, until 2022, it didn’t even have a Wikipedia page. But it’s a piece of magic, conjuring fragility and power at the same time, beautifully delivered by Martha Davis. The sax solo is Marmite - if you can’t stand it, try the cover by Angel Olsen.

90

The King Of Rock 'N' Roll - Prefab Sprout

1988, No 7

Paddy McAloon’s tale of a washed-up one-hit wonder was intended as satire, but he did it too well. He gave the song-within-a-song the silliest chorus imaginable – ‘Hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque’ – and it became his best-loved line.

89

You're The First, The Last, My Everything - Barry White

1974, No 1

In the battle of the Barries, I was leaning towards Barry Manilow and Copacabana. Then, walking through Hull one Saturday night, I went past a pub and heard Barry White’s bass-baritone booming out. If a soul ballad is still the sound of Saturday night after 50 years, that’s good enough for this list – even though the pub was the Hull Cheese.

88

Why - Annie Lennox

1992, No 5

‘All the best songs,’ a record producer once told me, ‘are slow’. That was Stephen Lipson, who produced this glorious case in point. Lennox wrote the lyrics from the heart, setting herself a test with some long pensive lines about a love gone wrong. She passed with flying colours by going through all the gears.

87

Don't Look Back In Anger - Oasis

1996, No 1

The story of Oasis boils down to two feuding brothers and two great songs. Wonderwall is formidable, but Don’t Look Back In Anger, which could be addressed to the Gallaghers themselves, is better. Once a beery anthem, sung by Noel not Liam, it found a nobler destiny when it became the balm Manchester needed after the arena bombing in 2017. 

It had already inspired another great single: wandering through his home town, Las Vegas, Brandon Flowers of The Killers was once handed a free ticket to see Oasis. He was so impressed with Don’t Look Back In Anger that he wrote Mr Brightside (see No 7).

86

Walk This Way - Run-DMC

1986, No 8

There’s no better matchmaker in music than Rick Rubin, the producer who paired Johnny Cash with Nine Inch Nails (see No 23). In 1984 Rubin played an old Aerosmith hit to the rappers Run-DMC, who ended up inviting its authors, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, to join this remake. The result was heavy-metal hip-hop – one hell of a blast.

85

I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston

1992, No 1

The synthesiser is gloopy, the saxophone even worse. But this is a belter of a ballad, written by Dolly Parton with her knock-out directness. Whitney made it her own in the first 45 seconds, singing so mightily and so musically that you wonder why anyone bothered adding instruments.

84

Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen

1975, No 1; 1991, No 1

Pop that is preposterous tends not to age well – just look at Macarthur Park, or the complete works of Meat Loaf. But somehow Bohemian Rhapsody gets away with it. It’s about six songs in one and there’s something for everyone, as long as they can stand the absurdity. Not for nothing has it been the Christmas No 1 twice.

83

Take On Me - a-ha

1984, No 2

It was always lovely, with its gleaming hooks and cascading vocals. And now, late in life, it has had children. Two of the biggest hits of the 2020s, Blinding Lights by The Weeknd and As It Was by Harry Styles, draw their inspiration from the elegant synth-pop of Take On Me and Roxy Music’s More Than This.

82

Blueberry Hill - Fats Domino

1956, No 6

Two-and-a-quarter minutes of fabulous simplicity. It wasn’t written by Fats Domino, but it became his signature. The author, Vincent Rose, was born in 1880, and didn’t live to hear Domino’s version – or to receive a resounding compliment from another songwriter. ‘The moon stood still on Blueberry Hill,’ Leonard Cohen once said. ‘I would be happy to have written that line.’

81

God Save The Queen - Sex Pistols

1977, No 2

The Pistols had made a memorable entrance with Anarchy In The UK, but it was only a minor hit. The follow-up was the game-changer: just as explosive and far more popular, despite (and because of) being banned by the BBC. God Save The Queen captured a very British bolshiness, which resurfaced decades later in a different form – as the angry young people of the 1970s became the older generation who voted for Brexit.

80

Slave To Love - Bryan Ferry

1985, No 10

With Roxy Music, Ferry went all the way from the pop-art pizazz of Virginia Plain to the watercolour wistfulness of Avalon. And then he made Slave To Love – silky yet heartfelt, and, in a magic moment at the end of the middle eight, just sublime.

79

Harvest Moon - Neil Young

1992, No 36

Any old singer can tell us about wanting their love to last forever, but precious few have reported back from the reality of a long relationship. Neil Young rose to the challenge, 18 years after marrying Pegi Morton, with an entrancing melody and some crystalline singing. The marriage, alas, broke up in 2014.

78

Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) - Eurythmics

1983, No 2

A million songs are bittersweet, but Eurythmics’ first hit goes a step further. Written when Annie Lennox was feeling low, Dave Stewart was on a high and they’d just had a row, it’s half unnerving and half uplifting. Forty years on, it has made an unexpected move into comedy. ‘Sweet dreams are made of cheese,’ goes one meme. ‘Who am I to diss a brie?’

77

Redemption Song - Bob Marley & The Wailers

1980, did not chart

This was a new song, written as Marley faced up to the cancer that would kill him, but it could be as old as the hills – just one man and his acoustic guitar, making you feel the pain of slavery, both actual and mental. A cover by Johnny Cash, featuring Joe Strummer of The Clash, was released in 2003, and it was a collector’s item: two departed legends, singing the words of a third.

76

Shotgun - George Ezra

2018, No 1

Remember the days when a song would stick around all summer, shining like the sun? They haven’t quite gone. Shotgun, the sound of the summer of 2018, was still radiating warmth a year later. 

Arriving at Glastonbury to see Stormzy headline the Friday night, I just had time to find a food stall. On the Pyramid stage, George Ezra was singing Shotgun, with about 50,000 backing vocalists. Standing still was not an option, which is how I ended up dancing with a carton of macaroni cheese.

75

Don't Give Up - Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush

1986, No 9

Solsbury Hill, Games Without Frontiers, Sledgehammer: for a singer who grew up in Genesis, very much an album band, Gabriel has a rare gift for singles. This gospel-tinged ballad is social comment in the form of a domestic drama, starring Gabriel as a man who has lost his job and Kate Bush as the partner who stops him falling apart. Gabriel’s first choice, apparently, was Dolly Parton, who couldn’t have done it better.

74

Help! - The Beatles

1965, No 1

All The Beatles’ early hits were love songs, or thinly veiled lust songs – until this one, which is about losing your confidence. By singing ‘I feel so insecure’, John Lennon changed the course of pop. The music he wrote, with a little help from Paul McCartney, expressed the very thing he felt he was missing.

73

Last Christmas/Everything She Wants - Wham!

1984-85 & 2017, No 2; 2019-20, No 3; 2021-23, No 1

George Michael had a genius for two things: ballads and dance music. Here you get both, each as effortless as the other. Up to 2020, no single had sold so many copies without reaching No 1. Since then, Last Christmas has topped the chart three times, and in 2023 – 39 years after being beaten by Band Aid in 1984, and seven years after George’s untimely death on Christmas Day 2016 – it was, at last, the Christmas No 1.

72

Oliver's Army - Elvis Costello And The Attractions

1979, No 2

When he started out in the maelstrom of punk, Costello’s sound was as spiky as he was. After a couple of years he worked out that his iron fist needed a velvet glove. This withering look at English history, from Cromwell to Churchill, is also a piece of piano pop that sparkles like Abba.

71

Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me) - Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel

1975, No 1

A break-up song with a difference. Harley, who had just split from three of his bandmates, saw the lyrics as ‘a piece of vengeful poetry’. But the music he wrote could not have been more affable, with a honeyed melody and some of the best pauses in pop. Its charms have even survived being used as the soundtrack for a Viagra commercial.

70

Someone Like You - Adele

2011, No 1

The moments that are remembered from the Brit Awards tend to be gaffes, rows or protests. In 2011, against all odds, the big talking point was a piece of music: a bluesy ballad, played on the piano, sung with power and passion. To be there at the O2 Arena in London was to see an up-and-coming singer turn into a superstar.

69

Imagine - John Lennon

1971, album track; 1975, No 6; 1981, No 1

You may be a bit bored of it, you may be immune to its hippy idealism – but then you hear it unexpectedly, on the radio or at the school concert, and you can’t argue with its gleaming clarity. Like a good poem, Imagine takes a feeling and makes it soar.

68

One Day Like This - Elbow

2008, No 35; 2012, No 4

Guy Garvey is the most genial of lead singers and DJs, but if there’s one song he can’t stand, it’s My Way – ‘such a horrible sentiment’. Garvey once set himself a task in his diary: ‘Write something to replace My Way.’ Many years later he more or less managed it with One Day Like This, a string-driven ballad that bubbles up to become a beery anthem. Full of yearning yet firmly grounded, it’s so heartwarming that, as Elbow’s string quartet reported back to Garvey, it has become a favourite at weddings.

67

Dancing In The Dark - Bruce Springsteen

1984, No 4

Ever since he sat down to write his memoirs in the mid-2010s, the Boss has been confessing to some complicated stuff. But it hadn’t always been hidden: quite a few of his demons are in this, his first UK top-ten hit, which took his self-loathing and turned it into a controlled euphoria.

66

The Whole Of The Moon - The Waterboys

1985, No 26; 1991, No 3

Music, like Jupiter, has many moons, from Moon River to The Killing Moon and Bad Moon Rising. But the moon with the most lasting glow is this folk-rock anthem by Mike Scott. Rousing as a football chant, it’s also romantic enough to have been sung in church by the protagonists in a rom-com (Let It Snow, 2019). Its interpreters have included Fiona Apple, who added some sauce for the TV series The Affair, and Prince, who flipped the pronouns, so the romance was with himself.

65

Don't Stop ’Til You Get Enough - Michael Jackson

1979, No 3

Jackson’s legacy has lost some of its lustre in the light of the documentary Finding Neverland. But the church welcomes sinners and so does the chart – rare is the week when there is no Jackson collection in the top 50. This single, masterminded by Quincy Jones, launched a cascade of dance-pop classics.

64

Tainted Love - Soft Cell

1981, No 1

A good cover version takes an old song and makes something new. A great cover version makes the song famous, which is what happened when Marc Almond and Dave Ball got hold of Gloria Jones’s half-forgotten Northern Soul floor-filler and turned it into a piece of charming sleaze.

63

Dancing Queen - Abba

1976, No 1

It’s not the most danceable of disco tracks, and it features some of Bjorn Ulvaeus’s least polished lyrics (‘with a bit of rock music, everything’s fine’). But Benny Andersson had come up with a gorgeous melody and the sound has a special warmth, even by Abba’s towering standards. 

If you put this song on at a party, it lights up the room – whether the guests are in their 70s or, like the dancing queen herself, only 17.

62

It's A Sin - Pet Shop Boys

1987, No 1

In the early 1980s I was a junior writer for Smash Hits, the pop magazine that sold a million copies a fortnight and came to sum up its era. When I wrote an album review – £7.50 for 100 words – the commissioning editor was a nice man called Neil Tennant. The rest of us knew he had a band of his own but never imagined it would take off. 

By 1985 he and his friend Chris Lowe were top of the charts with the classic West End Girls. It’s A Sin was even better: a melodramatic stomper (Tennant likened it to heavy metal) that took a light-hearted look at growing up with Catholic guilt. It acquired a layer of gravitas in 2021, when Russell T. Davies borrowed its name for his harrowing TV drama about the Aids generation of the 1980s.

61

In Dreams - Roy Orbison

1963, No 6

‘A candy-coloured clown they call The Sandman,’ it begins, and you wonder where he’s going with this. But he knows exactly where he’s going – step by step, to the most vital word in the songwriter’s vocabulary, ‘you’. And because he’s Roy Orbison, every note is resplendent.

60

Fairytale Of New York - The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl

1987, No 2; 2005-07 and 2017-21, top five; 2022-23, top ten

The Christmas song with everything. It’s an Irish jig, a portrait of a marriage, a bone of contention (for containing the word ‘faggot’, which is sung in character, and thus surely permissible), and now a memorial to two distinctive singers. 

Like most Christmas songs, it’s made for a singalong, but unlike them it captures the real Christmas spirit, that woozy mix of nostalgia, over-sharing, romance and recrimination. ‘I could have been someone,’ moans Shane MacGowan’s character, unaware that he’s just setting up Kirsty MacColl’s retort: ‘Well, so could anyone.’

59

Sweet Caroline -Neil Diamond

1971, No 8

An effortless crowd-pleaser, Sweet Caroline pleases a sports crowd so much that it has become part of the furniture everywhere from Arsenal to the Boston Red Sox. In December 2022, four years after being forced to leave the stage by Parkinson’s disease, Neil Diamond returned to sing it on Broadway. Touching me, touching you, it’s not so much a song, more a wave of togetherness.

58

Only You - Yazoo

1982, No 2

The challenge for electro-pop acts is always to squeeze some feeling out of their machinery. In the 1980s nobody did it better than Vince Clarke, who came up with Just Can’t Get Enough for Depeche Mode, A Little Respect for Erasure, and, in between, this peach of a love song, served up with heart and soul by Alison Moyet.

57

Mr Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra

1978, No 6

Many of Jeff Lynne’s hits are like fast food, delicious at first, then suddenly unsatisfying. But somehow Mr Blue Sky feels like a proper meal. Instead of borrowing from one Beatles song, Lynne poured about 12 of them into a blender, from Penny Lane to A Day In The Life, and produced something so uplifting that not even his fondness for the vocoder could ruin it.

56

Once In A Lifetime - Talking Heads

1981, No 14

And you may ask yourself: is it art rock? Is it Afrobeat? Is it a skit on televangelists? Whatever it is, it’s a classic. Like Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ (See No 3), it was co-written by Brian Eno, who, according to Talking Heads’ bass player Tina Weymouth, was the only man in the studio helping with the washing-up.

55

American Pie - Don McLean

1971, No 2

A history of pop in eight minutes. The story begins with McLean working as a paper boy in 1959, reading about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, and swells into an epic tale of lost innocence, packed with playful clues and pinpoint rhymes (‘drove a Chevy to the levee’). It even inspired a cover version by Madonna, for which McLean should not be held responsible.

54

Crazy In Love - Beyoncé featuring Jay-Z

2003, No 1

A song that really captures its subject: you feel as if you’re falling, in a good way. Beyoncé’s majestic original has attracted cover versions by two giants of art rock – a Twenties jazz version by Bryan Ferry (not singing, but leading his orchestra), and a samba by David Byrne.

53

You've Got A Friend In Me - Randy Newman

1995, did not chart; 2010, No 119

Randy Newman’s gigs are mostly just him and his piano, but there are two moments of mass participation. In I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It), Newman, playing a past-it rock star, gets the audience to sing ‘you’re dead, you’re dead’. Then, with You’ve Got A Friend In Me, satire melts away and everybody sings their heart out, because the theme from Toy Story – so simple, so reassuring – is the sound of their childhood, or their children’s.

52

Hot Love - T. Rex

1971, No 1

When he reached the top, after a struggle, Marc Bolan had an enviable headache: how to follow a pop song as polished as Ride A White Swan. He came up with something even sharper, a nonchalant blues that contains one of the great couplets – ‘Well she’s faster than most / And she lives on the coast.’

51

I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor

1979, No 1

Pop in the golden age, from Like a Rolling Stone to Under My Thumb, was sometimes tarnished by the dismal sound of powerful men sneering at women. I Will Survive is the retort they richly deserved. It was written by two male songwriters, but Gaynor made it her own by finding the fun in the fury.

50

50 Ways To Leave Your Lover - Paul Simon

1976, No 23

From American Tune to The Obvious Child, Simon’s solo singles are every bit as rewarding as his hits with Garfunkel, and usually more innovative. This song, a US No 1, coolly combines a chorus like a nursery rhyme with verses full of nuance, a rueful drum roll and an audacious brevity – there may be 50 ways, but only five are mentioned.

49 

Nothing Compares 2 U - Sinead O’Connor

1990, no.1

Written by Prince, but made by Sinead. She took a conventional rock ballad and made it her own with two great performances. First, in the studio, she threw her heart into it; then, in the video, she grabbed us with her gaze and floored us with her tears. Now that she’s gone, it’s all the more powerful.

48

Our House - Madness

1982, No 5

Almost all of Madness’s early hits are a treat and none better than this hand grenade of happiness. It is the solemn duty of every parent to sing it with the kids in the car.

47

Ever Fallen In Love - Buzzcocks

1978, No 12

One night in 1977, the Buzzcocks were in an Edinburgh guest house, drinking beer and ‘half-watching’ Guys & Dolls on the telly. ‘Have you ever fallen in love,’ Marlon Brando was being asked, ‘with someone you shouldn’t have?’ Pete Shelley (RIP) thought that would make a song. It made a classic, combining the pace of punk and the grace of pop.

46

Every Breath You Take - The Police

1983, No 1

Most songwriters, it’s said, have one song that out-earns all the rest of their work. For Sting, although he has had umpteen hits, it’s surely this one. It’s reckoned to be the most played song ever on American radio, overtaking You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ (See No 40). It feels like the product of a dare: what’s the creepiest lyric you can come up with and still write a song that people love?

45

A Whiter Shade Of Pale - Procol Harum

1967, No 1

Some bands go from the sublime to the ridiculous, and others just mix the two. The organ here has the gravity and grace of Bach, from whom it was borrowed, while the words lurch from classical allusions to hippie head-scratchers. 

It’s all held together by Gary Brooker’s vocal, a model of soulful elegance. In Memory, an unusually intimate new film starring Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, this is the only song you hear, and the only one you need.

44

You Can't Hurry Love - The Supremes

1966, No 3

If there were any justice in the charts, the compilations that keep selling forever – by Queen, Abba, Elton et al – would be joined by the best of Diana Ross and the Supremes. The hits Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote for them have a swing that never grows old.

43

Waterloo Sunset - The Kinks

1967, No 2

If John Lennon had not gone to a church fete in 1957 and met Paul McCartney, Ray Davies might be seen as Britain’s greatest pop songwriter. He came up with classics as diverse as You Really Got Me, All Day And All Of The Night, Sunny Afternoon, Days, Lola – and Waterloo Sunset, a song about not feeling afraid that was described by Pete Townshend as ‘divine’.

42

Stayin' Alive - Bee Gees

1978, No 4

Ah, ha, ha, ha... A velvet hook, a snaky bass, a beat that throbs like your heart (the song is now used in CPR training), a fluttering falsetto, a swirl of brotherly harmonies – and a story of desperation ends up displaying the unbeatable lightness of Bee-Gee-ing.

41

No Particular Place To Go - Chuck Berry

1964, No 3

The wittiest hit from one of pop’s sharpest pens. Berry was a nightmare, but he was also the godfather of the golden age, shaping the sound of The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys. ‘If you tried to give rock ’n’ roll another name,’ John Lennon said, ‘you might call it Chuck Berry.’

40

You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' - The Righteous Brothers

1965, No 1

All political careers, they say, end in failure. And so do nearly all romances, but love, unlike politics, brings a consolation prize: the special solace of the sad song. This track, with its magnetic melancholy, was the most-played piece of music on American radio in the 20th Century.

39

Heart Of Glass - Blondie

1979, No 1

The hit single with everything: it’s a pop record, a new-wave anthem and a disco floor-filler. It’s succinct, bittersweet, instantly endearing, yet you don’t tire of it. And Debbie Harry and Chris Stein wrote it themselves.

38

The Tracks Of My Tears - Smokey Robinson And The Miracles

1969, No 9

When Smokey sings, we hear more than violins – we hear soul and pop melting into one. This classic, covered by everyone from Linda Ronstadt to Avicii, was voted the fifth best song of all time in 2000 by a panel that included two of Robinson’s greatest peers, Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson.

37

Crazy - Patsy Cline

1961, did not chart; 1987, No 79

When she died in a plane crash aged 30, Patsy Cline left behind a stash of country songs that are more like guided missiles, primed to travel from the depths of her soul to the depths of yours. Crazy was composed by the then-unknown Willie Nelson, whose crystalline words – ‘Worry/ Why do I let myself worry?/ Wondering/ What in the world did I do’ – could have been written today. Cline took some persuading (by her second husband) to record it, then made it utterly her own.

36

Superstition - Stevie Wonder

1973, No 11

The lyrics are a lecture, solemnly informing us that being superstitious makes little sense. Try turning that into a good song – but the music is magic. Playing everything bar the brass, Stevie conjures up a pair of wonders: possibly the greatest riff not played on a guitar (it’s a Clavinet), and possibly the greatest bassline not played on the bass (it’s a Moog synthesiser).

35

Love Will Tear Us Apart - Joy Division

1980, No 13; 1983, No 19

The singles chart prefers to keep things sunny, which makes the dark stuff, when it comes along, all the more powerful. Ian Curtis’s masterpiece has a great title, a great hook and, alas, a stark truth. By the time it came out, it had become his memorial.

34

The Girl From Ipanema - Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto

1964, No 29

The singer, Astrud Gilberto, received no credit, and only took part because she was the best English-speaker on hand when her husband, Joao, was translating his Brazilian-Portuguese song. But what a job she did, adding cool understatement and precise phrasing (‘tall… and tan… and young… and lovely’) to a sumptuous vibe. The song was voted the 27th best Brazilian song of all time by Rolling Stone. If there are 26 better ones, I’d like to hear them.

33

A Chance Is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke

1964, did not chart

It took only one person, Cooke himself, to write this epic plea for human dignity. But it took 30 to perform it, with an orchestra adding luscious strings and a different lead instrument for each verse, including an exquisite French horn. It reached a wider audience through Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X (1992), which spends three hours working up to the moment when Cooke’s voice rings out and Denzel Washington, as Malcolm, walks into the ballroom where his assassin is waiting.

32

Hotel California - The Eagles

1977, No 8

It begins as a folk-rock instrumental – running for 50 seconds before the drums kick in, let alone the vocals – and ends up as an epic reggae-tinged anthem about the loss of innocence. It has lingered in our minds so long that its best line has entered the language. We can check out any time we like, but we can never leave.

31

Killing Me Softly With His Song - Roberta Flack

1973, No 6

Songs about singing, from I Write The Songs to Thank You For The Music, can be a little queasy – but not this one, the most graceful of soul ballads. It topped the charts 23 years later as a hip-hop hit by The Fugees, with Lauryn Hill seconding Flack’s emotion.

30

Heartbreak Hotel - Elvis Presley

1956, No 2

In your relationship with pop, the tone is set in your teens. If you’re really lucky, the surging hormones coincide with a youthquake. Oh to have been a teenager in 1956, when rock ’n’ roll went off like a whoopee cushion in a world that was as prim as a front parlour. The man of the moment was Elvis, who had the looks, the hips, the quiff and above all the voice, expressing everything from testosterone to tenderness.

29

The Sound Of Silence - Simon & Garfunkel

1965, did not chart

Of all the lines from all the hits in the golden age of pop, the one that speaks to us most clearly today, nearly 60 years later, may be the first few words of this modest marvel: ‘Hello darkness, my old friend.’

28

Ashes To Ashes - David Bowie

1980, No 1

Bowie did love an alter ego. Before Ziggy Stardust there was Major Tom in Space Oddity, the hit that made Bowie’s name. Long afterwards Major Tom reappeared in a sequel which, like The Godfather Part II, somehow surpasses the original. The major has been ruined by success, as if he were a rock star. Bowie makes you feel his pain while also delivering a funk-pop gem.

27

Seven Nation Army - The White Stripes

2003, No 7

If a poll were conducted to pick the greatest riff in history, the winner would probably be the five notes Keith Richards plays at the start of Satisfaction (See No 21) – but they might now be run close by the seven notes Jack White plays at the start of Seven Nation Army. 

Fraught with tension and release, the riff has become a chorus too, celebrating everything from, Oh, Jeremy Corbyn to the Italian football team, whose fans have their own name for Seven Nation Army: Po Po Po Po Po Po Po.

26

I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself - Dusty Springfield 

1964, No 3

A conversational title, a dramatic scenario, a melody from Burt Bacharach, a lyric by Hal David, and a voice of the kind you can expect to hear when you get to heaven.

25

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free - Nina Simone

1967, did not chart

Feeling Good is an old friend and My Baby Just Cares For Me oozes charm, but this lesser-known Simone song has extra depth, as a supreme voice comes reinforced with righteous indignation. For listeners of a certain age, there’s a further frisson when they recognise the perfectly paced piano that used to introduce Film 78 With Barry Norman.

24

Common People - Pulp

1995, No 2

When Britpop met glam rock. The kinetic energy alone would have made it memorable, but the story Jarvis Cocker told made it a classic.

23

Hurt/Personal Jesus - Johnny Cash

2003, No 39

If you were writing the recipe for a great single, you might not go for ‘bleak song about self-harm, sung by dying man’. But it worked a treat as Cash, coaxed by his producer Rick Rubin, took a sad song – Nine Inch Nails’ masterpiece – and made it better by giving it the stamp of mortality. 

On the other side Cash covered a Depeche Mode hit that had been inspired by Priscilla Presley’s book about Elvis. He called it ‘probably the most evangelical gospel song I ever recorded’.

22

Stand By Me - Ben E. King

1961, No 27; 1987, No 1

A great soul voice, a classic chord progression, and (from King’s co-writers, Leiber and Stoller) immaculate craftsmanship. It took a Levi’s commercial to make Stand By Me a big hit, but other singers – from John Lennon to Florence Welch – have always known how good it was.

21

(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - Rolling Stones

1965, No 1

It may be a little too familiar now, but you can hardly hold that against a pop record. This was the moment when the Stones found themselves – Keith Richards with the most expressive of his great riffs, Mick Jagger with a vocal that’s top of the strops.

20

Blue Monday - New Order

1983, No 9; 1988, No 3; 1995, No 17

In three years, the surviving members of Joy Division went from being eloquently miserable to pumping out seven minutes of elation. The consequence was that Blue Monday became the bestselling 12in single of all time. 

And it has yet to fade away. By 2012 it was being remade by a male-voice choir from Blaenau Ffestiniog, and in 2020 it was on the trailer for Wonder Woman 1984, with the tagline ‘Welcome to the future’.

19

Fever - Peggy Lee

1958, No 5

Dozens of singers have succumbed to Otis Blackwell’s Fever, but it was Peggy Lee who nailed it. She slowed it down, stripped it down and calmed it down, rewriting the words and replacing most of the instruments with finger clicks. By making it less feverish, she made it unforgettable.

18

Good Vibrations - Beach Boys

1966, No 1

A song in six sections, recorded over seven months, on 90 hours of tape, with countless instruments, Good Vibrations could well have been a fiasco. Its saving grace was that for all its intricacy, Brian Wilson’s pocket symphony still had the sweetness of the Beach Boys’ early hits.

17

Dancing In The Street - Martha And The Vandellas

1964, No 28; 1969, No 4

‘Calling out around the world. Are you ready for a brand new beat?’ Every era needs a clarion call, and Martha Reeves supplied it with a little help from Marvin Gaye, who co-wrote this ode to joy. It finally reached No 1 in 1985, as a larky fundraiser for Live Aid from David Bowie and Mick Jagger.

16

Don't Dream It's Over - Crowded House

1987, No 27

So many great songs tell you what not to do: Don’t Think Twice, Don’t Stop Believin’, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. And the best of the lot is Neil Finn’s gentle plea for hope. When he joined Fleetwood Mac’s world tour in 2018, Finn’s acoustic version of Don’t Dream It’s Over was there partly to give his senior colleagues a breather – but it ended up stealing the show.

15

Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever - The Beatles

1967, No 2

Two young superstars, two places in Liverpool, two sets of childhood memories – and two quite different songs. With Strawberry Fields, John Lennon looked inwards in the lyrics and forwards in the music, blending psychedelia with psychodrama. 

With Penny Lane, his instant riposte to Strawberry Fields, Paul McCartney looked outwards – at the barber, the banker, the fireman – and harked back to music hall. Two classic songs, which have now turned two ordinary places into two world-famous tourist attractions.

14

Life On Mars - David Bowie

1971, album track; 1973, No 3

Want to write a classic ballad? Just come up with a response to My Way. Much as Elbow were to do decades later with One Day Like This (See No 68), Bowie used a naff song as the catalyst for a great one. 

The melody is an aria and the lyrics are a parade of vivid images from the sailors fighting in the dancehall to the lawman beating up the wrong guy. With his vocal and Rick Wakeman’s piano, Bowie gave melodrama a good name.

13

Kiss - Prince And The Revolution

1986, No 6

At his peak, Prince could rub two sticks together and make a hit. With Kiss he turned the simplest of materials – a strum, a beat, a yelp – into a blaze of desire. It has been remade by singers from Tom Jones, who had a laugh with The Art Of Noise, to Joan As Police Woman, who found the sadness lurking inside the sensuality.

12

Blowin' In The Wind - Bob Dylan

1963, did not chart

The Dylan hit that does best in the all-time lists is Like A Rolling Stone, a classic that now leaves a sour taste with its vindictiveness. This, his first civil-rights anthem, has far more to say and says it with stunning simplicity, while also being oblique enough to get played on the radio in middle America.

11

Hallelujah - Leonard Cohen

1984, did not chart; 2008, No 36

A biblical ballad that has slowly become the most famous song by the most lyrical of lyricists. It took 24 years to find its moment, but what a moment that was. Hallelujah was the Christmas No 1 in 2008, belted out by Alexandra Burke, who had just won The X Factor on ITV. It was also the Christmas No 2, crooned by Jeff Buckley, who had died in 1997 and had based his version on the first cover of the song, recorded by John Cale of the Velvet Underground for the film Shrek. (You couldn’t make it up.) 

That same Christmas, Cohen himself scraped into the top 40 for his one and only appearance in the UK singles chart. Buckley had a beautiful voice, but Cohen’s version is the clearest of them all, the sound of a man who had spent five years honing the lyrics.

10

(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman - Aretha Franklin

1967, did not chart; 2018, No 79

If you were putting together a dream team to make a record, you might well have Aretha as the singer and Carole King and Gerry Goffin as the songwriters. In 2015, at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, King was one of the honorees, Aretha sang this song to her, and Barack Obama wasn’t the only one in tears.

9

Will You Love Me Tomorrow - The Shirelles

1961, No 4

Carole King has written 118 hits, none better than this ode to the insecurities of the heart – so good that, when her jukebox musical Beautiful was staged, it appeared four times. The Shirelles, the first great girl group, recorded the original, which Bryan Ferry once described as ‘a little bit uptown, a little bit downtown’. Ferry’s own version, flipping the genders and underlining the sadness, is just as touching.

8

Got To Give It Up (PT1) - Marvin Gaye

1977, No 7

It’s late. You’re at the office party. You may have said the wrong thing to the boss. You’re avoiding the dancefloor. And then you hear a groove… A sound so irresistible that you just have to go for it, even if you’re British. That groove reappeared 36 years later on another big hit, Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, for which, following a landmark ruling, Gaye’s estate now receives royalties.

7

Mr Brightside - The Killers

2003, did not chart; 2004, No 10

For about 40 years from 1963, the singles chart did what music ought to do: it united us. It was a broad church. Then a few factors – the rise of radio narrowcasting and internet bubbles, the fall of Top Of The Pops – conspired to turn it into a teenage ghetto. But every so often a song breaks through and brings us together again. 

Mr Brightside, with its surging urgency, has become the sound of Saturday night, the singalong that sends people home on a high. A single that flopped at first has now spent over 220 weeks on the chart, an all-time record.

6

Wicked Game - Chris Isaak

1989, did not chart; 1990, No 10

Inspired by a woman he didn’t like but couldn’t resist, Isaak wrote a late-night ballad that is like a flame – flickering, mesmerising, raising the temperature. In 2019 he sang it with Lana Del Rey, who called it ‘the sexiest song of all time’.

5

Hey Jude/Revolution - The Beatles

1968, No 1

It started life as a cosy piano ballad, addressed to a small boy whose parents had split up (Julian Lennon, aged five). Then Paul McCartney added an epic fade-out, which led to its becoming the prototype for the stadium-rock singalong. 

And now it is rivalling Sweet Caroline as the song most likely to be sung by a sports crowd. Hey Jude was rated the greatest of all McCartney’s songs by John Lennon – who was on top form himself on the flipside with Revolution, a hard-rock anthem that’s also a brisk critique of hippy thinking.

4

Bridge Over Troubled Water - Simon & Garfunkel

1970, No 1

Sometimes a signature song bears little resemblance to an act’s signature. Simon & Garfunkel, the masters of melancholy middle-class folk-pop, should have been no good at gospel. 

These days their record company might well have talked them out of it. But Paul Simon showed, as he would later with Latin and African music, that his creativity knew no bounds, and Art Garfunkel rose to the occasion with a stupendous vocal. Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley soon released covers, neither an improvement on the original.

3

‘Heroes’ - David Bowie

1977, no.24; 2016, no.12

‘A classic,’ said the writer Italo Calvino, ‘is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.’ As with books, so with songs. Even among Bowie’s greatest hits, ‘Heroes’ stands out on this score. The music is gripping, with its plush sound, crisp hook and groggy guitar (caused by jet lag, according to Bowie’s co-writer Brian Eno: the guitarist, Robert Fripp, had just joined them in Berlin by taking a red-eye from New York). 

The lyrics are touching – the dolphins, the doomed love, the shadow of the Wall. The meaning is elusive – those inverted commas. The vocal is involving – the yearning, the defiance, the way Bowie goes from a murmur to a screech. More than a great song, this is a drama in three-and-a-half minutes. It’s even glorious in German.

2

I Feel Love - Donna Summer

1977, No 1

The record-buying public of 1977 may have underestimated ‘Heroes’, but they were spot-on with this, the most sensual piece of dance music ever made. Summer’s producer, Giorgio Moroder, was trying to imagine the sound of the future, and he succeeded, conjuring up a shimmering ecstasy that anticipated the whole genre of EDM. I Feel Love is still the dance track most dance tracks aspire to be. In 2019 it was covered by Sam Smith, who stayed close to the original. What else can you do?

1

Something/Come Together - The Beatles

1969, No 4

By The Beatles’ standards this was a flop – their first single in six years not to reach the top two. But it’s a phenomenal record. Come Together, largely written by John Lennon, is bluesy, funky and jokey, the sound of four young superstars having fun. ‘If I had to pick one song that showed the four disparate talents of the boys and the ways they combined to make a great sound,’ said their producer George Martin, ‘I would choose Come Together.’ The title ended up tinged with irony: The Beatles were coming apart, and this was the last recording on which they all played at the same time.

Something is even better – a timeless love song that drew rave reviews from The Beatles’ peers. Paul Simon called it ‘a masterpiece’, while Elton John once said it was ‘the song I’ve been chasing for the last 35 years’. Frank Sinatra considered it ‘the greatest Lennon-McCartney song,’ which was awkward because it was written by George Harrison.

He may have been only the third-best songwriter in the band, but with Something George joined John and Paul at the very top of the pyramid of pop. He pinched the most famous line from his friend James Taylor’s Something In The Way She Moves and made it his own by setting it to a more memorable melody. He put Taylor’s scansion to better use with a magical line: ‘Somewhere in her smile, she knows.’ And he played a guitar solo that was very George Harrison – gentle, soulful and a complement to the words, not an attempt to show off.

Something is a love song that glows like someone who’s in love. But it wasn’t always so romantic: before he came up with ‘attracts me like no other lover’, George sang ‘attracts me like a cauliflower’.

Tim de Lisle is the pop critic of The Mail on Sunday and the editor of Lives Of The Great Songs (Penguin, 1995). He picked his 100 favourite albums for The Mail on Sunday in 2019.