Lennon’s cosmic blues only serves to add further weight to the darkness at the heart of the Beatles’ sprawling White Album. That strand would find its fullest expression on Pet Sounds, but In My Room – about a place “I can go and tell my secrets to” – will ring true for as long as adolescents angrily stomp off upstairs.

The Beach Boys, unlike almost all their contemporaries, understood that the teenage state of mind involved more than parties and break-ups it was also about solipsism and solitude. It wasn’t all T-Birds and Surfin’ Safaris. Now a standard, it was banned by US radio after 9/11 too much irony. Its greeting-card sentiments would have turned to goo if sung by anyone but genial toughie Armstrong, and even then it tanked at home while hitting the UK top spot. Co-written with George Weiss, this two-minute paean to life’s simple pleasures was the result. The machismo with which he plans his own funeral – “Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain/ So you can let all the boys know I died standing pat” – contains startling similarities to some of rap’s funeral songs, such as Tupac’s Life Goes On: “Bury me smilin’ with Gs in my pocket.” GTĪs the US descended into racial and political strife, Impulse! records boss Bob Thiele (a jazz aficionado) decided the country needed something uplifting. GMĪ classic New Orleans funeral blues, in which a rounder discovers his woman has died and he’ll shortly be following her. A song for when the “Bloody Mary” of life is sorely “lacking a Tabasco”. But that’s a strength that derives from its graceful, old-fashioned melody, and the way the virtuoso lyric glories in the pleasures of witty metaphor and scabrous innuendo.

This wry treatise on female sexual disappointment, co-written, perhaps significantly, by Alex Turner and his ex-girlfriend Johanna Bennett, could be about a woman who settled down too young at 23 or one who has hit a midlife crisis at 43. Those lines would deepen further over the drug-addled next decade, before Tyler’s dreams were finally fulfilled by global popularity in 1987. Still only in his mid-20s, but frustrated by a lack of momentum in his music career, Steven Tyler displayed a Jackson Browne-esque level of maturity-before-his-time when he sang “Every time that I look in the mirror/ All these lines on my face gettin clearer” in Aerosmith’s anthemic debut single from their first album. It was so far ahead of its time when originally recorded in 1969 that Studio One’s legendary producer Coxsone Dodd rejected it, leaving the song unreleased until the vocal trio formed their own label two years later. Partially sung in Amharic (the title translates as “give praise”), it’s a minor-key classic of close harmonies and the traditional Rastafarian longing for repatriation. Satta Massagana is one of the most covered tunes in the history of reggae and a rare instance of a song that crossed over into church groups rather than the other way round.

I got 2 phones download