Time for another look back at a date in chart history. What were the songs and the stories at number one on December 6th through the years…

On this day in 1980, ABBA were about to begin their thirty-first and final week on top of the UK singles chart with ‘Super Trouper’. My favourite ABBA chart-topper probably changes on a weekly basis, and I could make a case for all of them (apart from ‘Fernando’, sorry). ‘Super Trouper’ is a late-era classic, with that perfect balance of upbeat melancholoy. Songs about how tiring it is being famous can be, well, tiring; but this is a colossus of the genre. I was sick and tired of everything, When I called you last night from Glasgow… is a quintessential ABBA opening line: slightly odd, poetic, beautifully to the point.

Eleven years earlier, on this day in 1969, the Rolling Stones headlined the infamous Altamont Free Concert in California. Supposed to be the West Coast’s answer to Woodstock, it ended up becoming synonymous with the end of the swinging sixties and the death of the hippy dream. Violence which had been brewing throughout the day erupted during the Stones’ delayed set, and ended in the death of an eighteen year old spectator, Meredith Hunter, stabbed by one of the Hells Angels who had been brought in as security.

The Stones are perhaps the perfect band to encapsulate that loss of ’60s innocence, as they had never been particularly innocent, and had struggled with the psychedelic, hippy side of things. Also, they’re the sixties juggernaut that has lasted, and lasted, and lasted, far beyond the decade that birthed them… Here then is their big hit from earlier that year, their final UK #1, and perhaps the ultimate rock and roll tune, ‘Honky Tonk Women’.

In recent posts I’ve been bemoaning/celebrating the end of the Golden Era of the Boyband, which I think came to an end in late 2002. There are arguments to be had for boybands dating back to the fifties, with the likes of the Teenagers, or to the Monkees in the sixties. New Edition in 1983 and Bros in 1988 could lay claim to being the first modern boyband, but for my money the true holders of that title, and the openers of the floodgates, were New Kids on the Block. Who just so happened to be sitting at #1 on this day in 1989 with ‘You Got It (The Right Stuff)’. They were the first of twelve boybands (fourteen, if we bend my rules and count Hanson and Blazin’ Squad) to provide forty (or forty-two) #1s over thirteen years…

Let’s go way back now, sixty-seven years to be exact. Number one on this day in 1958 is what I called ‘the Scottish #1’ at the time, and which I still intend to make our national anthem when I become First Minister, replacing the dirge that is ‘Flower of Scotland’. The fifties was at times a musical desert, strewn with overwrought ballads, and the occasional rock ‘n’ roll tune. Then there were the novelties. So many novelties. Of which ‘Hoots Mon’ stands out as one of the finest. It’s got a wonderful rock ‘n’ roll energy, but it’s also a relic of a much earlier music hall era, with its singalong spirit and its Hammond organ. It’s based on an old folk tune, ‘A Hundred Pipers’, and features classic phrases such as ‘och aye’, ‘there’s a moose loose aboot this hoose’ and ‘it’s a braw, bricht, moonlicht nicht’, none of which a Scotsperson has ever actually uttered.

Finally, 6th December is perhaps best known as a date in music history for being the anniversary of Roy Orbison’s untimely death. In 1988, Orbison was just getting his career back on track through the success of the Travelling Wilburys, his supergroup alongside George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty, whose first album had been released earlier that year. Orbison had also just put the finishing touches to his first solo album in a decade, when he died suddenly, of a heart attack. The album ‘Mystery Girl’, and the lead single ‘You Got It’, posthumously returned him to the Top 10 the following year. But to celebrate his genius, let’s go back to 1960, and enjoy his first of three UK #1s: the hauntingly dramatic ‘Only the Lonely’.