Our next randomly selected #2 comes from what, for my money, must have been the most exciting time to be a pop music fan. Come with me back to the summer of 1963, and the Merseybeat explosion…

‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’, by Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas

#2 for 2 weeks, from 30^th May to 12^th June 1963, behind ‘From Me to You’

And its one Liverpudlian act, Billy J. Kramer, covering another, The Beatles. Many of the early beat bands ended up relying on Lennon & McCartney hand-me-downs, and The Dakotas were no different. A few months after this, their debut hit, they would score a first number one with another Beatles cast-off, ‘Bad to Me’.

‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’ had featured on the Fab Four’s first album, ‘Please Please Me’, released in March that year. (I only just realised that it was sung by George Harrison, who sounds remarkably like Paul McCartney on the recording.) It’s a sweet, simple song, but not one which really indicates that the band were going to be the biggest pop phenomenon the world had ever seen. And The Dakotas’ version is even more diluted, a little more ramshackle, a little old-fashioned in a rockabilly kind of way. Again nice, but they’d pick up the pace on ‘Bad to Me’.

It made #2 during the seven-week run of The Beatles’ first chart-topper, ‘From Me to You’ (not the last time Lennon & McCartney would occupy a Top 2…) It may even have been the best-selling single in the country at some point during its run, but not on the Record Retailer chart, which is what the Official Charts now recognise. It’s the reverse of the situation a few months earlier, when The Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’ had stalled at #2 in Record Retailer, and therefore the history books, behind yodeller supreme Frank Ifield.

Billy J. Kramer would remain popular for a year or two, scoring a second chart-topper with the ever so slightly creepy ‘Little Children’. Like so many of the earliest Merseybeat stars, though, his star had waned by 1965. The original ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’, meanwhile, would go on to be released as a single in the US, where it also made #2.