The Best Of Top Of The Pops "69" (Hallmark CD)

From the late 60s to the early 80s budget minded music fans could get cheap compilation albums of current hits as performed by session musicians. Today this may sound a bit strange but we must remember that available media to get music was much less before the "internet age" and it was the only way to listen to hit songs if you couldn't afford the original records and didn't want Tony Blackburn dribbling all over it on the radio (you couldn't very easily record off the radio either back then of course). As well as regular editions with recent hits, released every few months, every year a "best of" was released. This is a CD re-issue of the 1969 best of. One thing to notice is that every album had an attractive young lady on the cover, for this compilation we also get a collage of girls too!

So what are these cover versions like? Some of them are pretty good like "Bad moon rising" and "In the year 2525" though sometimes the cover is laughably poor, "Honky tonk woman" sounds more like the Struggling Drones than the Rolling Stones. Sometimes the cover doesn't really sound much at all like the original but is still a good track, "In the ghetto" doesn't sound much like Elvis but isn't a bad song in its own right. In most cases it probably helps if you arn't that familiar with the original so you can't compare it too closely.

Best track on here is "Sugar sugar", whoever these musicians were (and its written that Elton John and Tina Charles once worked on these albums before they were famous) they did a good job! Taken as a whole it makes for a pretty decent 60s party sound track.