22 May 1970

Pos	LW	Weeks	Song		Artist
1	2	8	Carol Ok	–	Chris Andrews
2	1	10	Ma Belle Amie	–	Tee Set
3	3	7	Spider Spider	–	Tidal Wave
4	5	10	Bridge Over Troubled Water	–	Simon & Garfunkel
5	6	7	Tchaikovsky One	–	Omega Limited
6	4	12	Love is a Beautiful Song	–	Dave Mills
7	8	5	Elizabethan Reggae	–	Boris Gardiner
8	9	6	My Baby Loves Lovin’	–	White Plains
9	7	10	Travellin’ Band	–	Creedence Clearwater Revival
10	11	3	Can’t Help Falling in Love	–	Andy Williams
11	New	1	Daughter of Darkness	–	Tom Jones
12	16	2	Knock Knock Who’s There	–	Mary Hopkin
13	New	1	When Julie Comes Around	–	Cuff Links
14	15	4	Die Tantes van Nantes	–	Al Debbo & Nico Carstens
15	10	12	Hitchin’ a Ride	–	Vanity Fare
16	17	3	She’s Gone	–	Ken J. Larkin
17	New	1	All Kinds of Everything	–	Dana
18	20	2	That Same Old Feeling	–	Pickettywitch
19	14	8	Let’s Work Together	–	Canned Heat
20	New	1	Come Softly to Me	–	Percy Sledge

Chris Andrews’ ‘Carol OK’ was the new number 1 this week as it knocked Tee Set’s ‘Ma Belle Amie’ off the top spot. The latter had been there for 3 weeks. Andrews was now only the second act to see 3 of their first 4 SA chart hits go to number 1 as his ‘Yesterday Man’ and ‘Pretty Belinda’ has also topped the charts with only ‘To Whom It Concerns’ being the odd one out, peaking at 4. The only other act to manage this was The Rolling Stones with their odd one for them being ‘The Last Time’ which only managed 7. No other act would see this many number 1s in their first 4 hits.

For the 3rd week running the biggest climber was 4 places and once again only 1 song managed this. This week it was Mary Hopkin’s ‘Knock Knock Who’s There’ which took the award as it moved up from 16 to 12.

On the falling front there was also a 3 week pattern as this was the 3rd week in a row that we had seen 2 songs have the biggest fall in the week. Vanity Fare’s ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’ and Canned Heat’s ‘Let’s Work Together’ both dropped 5 places to take the award this week with Vanity Fare ending up at 15 and Canned Heat at 19. Vanity Fare could take some comfort from the fact that their song was now the oldest on the chart as last week’s oldest fell off the top 20 (see below). ‘Hitchin’ A Ride’ was on 12 weeks and shared the ‘oldest title with Dave Mills’ ‘Love Is A Beautiful Thing’.

There were 4 songs that left the charts this week, the first of which was Herman’s Hermits’ ‘Years May Come Years May Go’ which spent 6 weeks in the top 20 and reached number 12 during that time. This brought the curtain down on Herman’s Hermits’ illustrious SA chart career. They had had 11 hits (tied 3rd highest to date), spent 95 weeks in the chart 9 (4th highest to date), seen 2 songs hit the top spot, these being ‘Mrs Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter’ and ‘My Sentimental Friend’ which spent 1 and 4 weeks respectively at the top. Of their 11 hits, 7 would make the top 10 which represented 63.6% of them. This would be the 16th highest percentage of hits to make the top 10 for the 25 artists who would ultimately have more than 10 songs chart.

Mark Lindsay’s ‘Arizona’ spent 10 weeks on the charts and peaked at 3. This would be his only SA chart hit, but he had also seen some chart action as a member of Paul Revere & The Raiders and wrote their SA chart hit ‘Let Me’. If one combines these 2 hits where Lindsay was involved, then he saw a total of 17 weeks in the charts with ‘Arizona’s peak of 3 being better than the 8 peak ‘Let Me’ managed.

Lee Marvin’s ‘Wandrin’ Star’ was wanderin’ off the charts this week after having spent 8 weeks with us and peaking at 6. This would be Marvin’s only SA chart hit.

Last to go was Edison Lighthouse’s ‘Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)’. The song had been in the charts for 12 weeks and peaked at 3. They too would see no other SA chart action than this hit making this the 6th time so far that we had seen 3 songs leave the chart in a week where they were the only SA chart for that act. However, this was not the record as on 28 February 1969 we had 5 songs leave the chart in total, 4 of which would be the respective acts’ only hits.

Tom Jones returned to the charts with his 14th hit to date, ‘Daughter Of Darkness’. He was leading the way for number of hits and was now 2 ahead of second placed Cliff Richard. One of the 2 song writers on the track, Les Reed was the leader on the number of hits by a song writer, having 17 to his name, and he was also 2 ahead of the person in second place, Barry Mason. The other song writer, Geoff Stephens was not too far behind, his 12 to date placing him 4th. ‘Daughter Of Darkness’ was his 18th song to chart in the UK where it would go to number 5 to extend his run of top 10 hits there to 3, a run that would have been 11 straight top 10 hits had ‘A Minute Of Your Time’ managed to climb 4 places higher than its actual peak of 14. In the US the song went to 13 and would top the Easy Listening Charts there. Jones was the only act which we had seen on the charts more weeks than we had seen him off as this was his 141st out of a total of 259 weeks where he had at least 1 song in the charts, meaning we had only seen 118 weeks where there was no Tom Jones hit in the top 20.

The Cuff Links returned to the top 20 with their 2nd SA chart hit, ‘When Julie Comes Around’. Like their previous hit, ‘Tracy’, the song was written by Lee Pockriss and Paul Vance giving them their 3rd and 4th hits respectively. The story goes that Ron Dante, the voice behind Cuff Links (and the Archies’ hit ‘Sugar Sugar’) said to Pockriss and Vance that he would make a whole album as Cuff Links if ‘Tracy’ was a hit and as the latter happened Dante had to keep his word and the song writers ended up running around writing songs for the album. They drafted in arranger Rupert Holmes who would have a hit with ‘Escape (The Pina Colada Song)’ and the album was made. ‘When Julie Comes Around’ was released and went to 41 in the US and 10 in the UK.

Last week the song that came second in the Eurovision Song Contest entered the charts and this week we saw the song that won that competition as a new entry. Dana’s ‘All Kinds Of Everything’ was the Irish entry in the contest and its success at the contest would result in it topping the UK charts for 2 weeks, knocking Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ from number 1 in the process. It was the second Eurovision winner to make our charts, the previous one being Sandie Shaw’s ‘Puppet On A String’.

Our final new entry was Percy Sledge with ‘Come Softly To Me’. This was Sledge’s 9th hit to date and he sat tied 6th for number of hits, equalling Manfred Mann and Petula Clark. More significantly it was the 100th song by a solo American male artist to chart. The US men had taken 107 weeks to get from 50 hits to 100 and this would be their all-time fastest 50. ‘Come Softly To Me’ was a cover of the 1959 hit for The Fleetwoods which had topped the charts in the US and made it to 6 in the UK. Sledge’s version, which did not make the UK, US or any of the major European charts, was recorded in 1968, but took its time to reach our shores, stopping off along the way for a 3 week stay in the (then) Rhodesian charts where it entered on 2 August 1969 and went to number 12.

Herman’s Hermits pulled 1 clear of The Hollies for weeks in the charts as they moved on to 95. They held on to 4th place on the weeks count list while The Hollies dropped to 5th. On the local list, Dave Mills moved on to 32 weeks in the charts and now had 7th place to himself while Des Lindberg, whom he shared the spot with last week, dropped to 8th. A similar thing happened to Ken J. Larkin who moved 1 ahead of Dickie Loader to make 10th spot his own.

‘Tchaikovsky One’ moved into tied 15th spot for songs charting in more than 1 version. It had clocked up a total of 13 weeks and shared 15th spot with ‘I’ll Step Aside’ (Tony Wells and Ronnie Wilson) and ‘Green Tambourine’ (Lemon Pipers and Sun Dragon).

A last note on this week’s chart was this was the 19th time we had seen the top and bottom song start with the same letter as we had ‘Carol OK’ at 1 and ‘Come Softly To Me’ at 20. The most popular letter so far to manage this was ‘S’ which we had seen 7 times, followed by ‘L’ which had seen this happen 5 times (‘The’ and ‘A’ at the start of a song title were ignored).

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