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The most successful version of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ was recorded by English rock group The Animals in 1964. It was a number one hit in the United Kingdom, United States, Sweden and Canada.

Alan Price of the Animals has claimed that the song was originally a sixteenth-century English folk song about a Soho brothel, and that English emigrants took the song to America where it was adapted to its familiar New Orleans setting.

The Rolling Stones' cut of 'It's All Over Now' is the most famous version of the song. It was the band's third single released in America, it stayed in the Billboard Hot 100 for ten weeks and was their first ever #1 hit.

The Valentinos' original version was played to the Rolling Stones during their first American tour in June 1964 by a New York radio DJ named Murray the K. Six months after Bobby Womack had apparently told Mick Jagger to get his own song, he received his royalty cheque and then told his manager that Mick Jagger could have any song he wanted.

Martha Reeves and the Vandellas were among the most successful groups of the Motown roster during the period 1963-1967 and were known for a harder, R&B sound, typified by '(Love Is Like A) Heat Wave', 'Nowhere To Run', 'Jimmy Mack' and, their signature song, 'Dancing in the Street'.

In 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Martha and the Vandellas #96 on their list of the 100 greatest artists of all time.

'Please Please Me' was the second single released by The Beatles in the UK, and the first to be issued in the US. It was also the title track of their first LP.

Lennon first conceived 'Please Please Me' as a bluesy, slow tempo song. "I remember the day I wrote it, I heard Roy Orbison doing 'Only the Lonely', or something. And I was also always intrigued by the words to a Bing Crosby song that went, 'Please lend a little ear to my pleas'. The double use of the word 'please'. So it was a combination of Roy Orbison and Bing Crosby."

Bowie's re-emergance in 1972 as his androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, epitomised a career often marked by musical innovation, reinvention and striking visual presentation.

The Ziggy Stardust character became the basis for Bowie's first large-scale US tour beginning in 1972, where he donned his famous flaming red mullet and wild outfits, designed by Kansai Yamamoto. The tour featured a three-piece band representing The Spiders from Mars: Ronson on guitar, Trevor Bolder on bass, and Mick Woodmansey on drums.

‘Rebel Rebel’ was the last single in the glam rock style that had been Bowie’s trademark. Bowie played guitar on this and almost all other tracks from Diamond Dogs, creating “a rocking dirty noise that owed as much to Keith Richards as it did to the departed Mick Ronson”.

The song is notable for its gender-bending lyrics ("You got your mother in a whirl / She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl") as well as its distinctive riff, Bowie himself later said, "It's a fabulous riff! Just fabulous! When I stumbled onto it, it was Oh, thank you!"

'My Generation' was released as a single on 5 November 1965, reaching #2 in the UK and #74 in America.

Townshend reportedly wrote the song on a train and is said to have been inspired by the Queen Mother, who is alleged to have had Townshend's 1935 Packard hearse towed off a street in Belgravia because she was offended by the sight of it during her daily drive through the neighbourhood. ‘My Generation’ was very much about trying to find a place in society.

'I Can't Explain' was the A-side of the group's first single released under the name The Who. The track also features on The Who's 1971 compilation album 'Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy.' In the album's liner notes, Townshend noted the song's similarity to the hit single 'All Day and All of the Night' by The Kinks:

"It can't be beat for straightforward Kink copying. There is little to say about how I wrote this. It came out of the top of my head when I was 18 and a half."

After seeing a large queue waiting to see the Boris Karloff film 'Black Sabbath,' the 'Earth' band changed its name in August 1969, deciding to create the musical equivalent of horror films.

'Paranoid' was written in the studio at the last minute. As Bill Ward explains: "We didn't have enough songs for the album, and Tony Lommi played the (Paranoid) guitar lick and that was it. It took twenty-five minutes from top to bottom."

The single was released ahead of the album in September 1970 reaching #4 in the UK.

The recording for 'Apache' was done at the EMI Abbey Road Studio in London, June 1960. Singer-guitarist Joe Brown had bought an Italian-built guitar echo chamber. He didn't like it and gave it to Hank Marvin. Marvin developed a new sound using the chamber with heavy vibrato using the tremolo arm of his Fender Stratocaster. Percussion was by Tony Meehan (drums) and Cliff Richard, who played a Chinese drum at the beginning and end to provide an atmosphere of stereotypically Native American music.

It topped the UK singles chart for five weeks, a month after the recording.

'Good Luck Charm' is a song performed by Elvis Presley that reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 list in the week ending April 21, 1962. It remained at the top of the list for two weeks. The song was written by Aaron Schroeder and Wally Gold and was recorded by Elvis in 1961.

Presley is regarded as one of the most important figures of twentieth-century popular culture. He is the best-selling solo artist in the history of popular music, with sales of approximately one billion units worldwide.

'Let's Get It On' by Marvin Gaye was released June 15, 1973. The song features romantic and sexual lyricism and funk instrumentation by The Funk Brothers. The title track of Gaye's landmark 1973 album of the same name; it was co-written with doo-wop pioneer Ed Townsend and begins with three great wah-wah notes.

'Let's Get It On' became Gaye's most successful single for Motown. With the help of the song's sexually-explicit content, 'Let's Get It On' helped give Gaye a reputation as a sex icon.

'Walk Away Renée' is a song made popular by the band The Left Banke in 1966. It was composed by the group's then 16-year-old keyboard player Michael Brown and Tony Sansone, along with Bob Calilli who was credited as a writer in exchange for setting up the session in which the writing of the song was completed. The song features a flute during the middle of the song, which was inspired by The Mamas & The Papas song 'California Dreamin'.

It has been widely covered by artists in a broad range of genres and styles, most successfully by The Four Tops in 1968.

In 1979, Jerry Dammers formed 2 Tone Records and The Special AKA released their debut single ‘Gangsters’, a reworking of Prince Buster's ska hit ‘Al Capone’. The song became a Top 10 hit in 1979. The Specials recorded their debut LP in 1979, produced by Elvis Costello. The album lead off with Dandy Livingstone's ‘Rudy, A Message to You’ (slightly reworded) and also had Prince Buster and Toots & The Maytals covers from the late 1960s. In 1980, the EP ‘Too Much Too Young’ (credited to The Special AKA) was a number one hit in the UK Singles Chart, despite controversy over the song's lyrics, which reference teen pregnancy and promote contraception.

'(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais' helped The Clash assert themselves as a more versatile band musically and politically than many of their peers, and it broke the exciting but limiting punk mould that had been established by the Sex Pistols; from now on The Clash would be "the thinking man's yobs".

The single was originally released in four different coloured sleeves. Please mark your preference in the comments box when ordering.

'(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais' helped The Clash assert themselves as a more versatile band musically and politically than many of their peers, and it broke the exciting but limiting punk mould that had been established by the Sex Pistols; from now on The Clash would be "the thinking man's yobs".

Denise Sullivan of Allmusic wrote that "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais" may have actually been the first song to merge punk and reggae." In 2004, Rolling Stone rated the song as #430 in its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

'Peggy Sue' is a rock and roll song written by Buddy Holly, Jerry Allison, and Norman Petty, and originally performed, recorded and released as a single by Buddy Holly and the Crickets in early July of 1957. The song is ranked #194 on the Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

The song was originally called 'Cindy Lou', and was named for Buddy's niece, the daughter of his sister Pat Holley Kaiter. The title was later changed to 'Peggy Sue' in reference to Crickets drummer Jerry Allison's girlfriend (and future wife), Peggy Sue Gerron, with whom he had recently had a temporary breakup.

'I Can't Explain' was the A-side of the group's first single released under the name The Who. The track also features on The Who's 1971 compilation album 'Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy.' In the album's liner notes, Townshend noted the song's similarity to the hit single 'All Day and All of the Night' by The Kinks:

"It can't be beat for straightforward Kink copying. There is little to say about how I wrote this. It came out of the top of my head when I was 18 and a half."

'The Eagle' was a British weekly comic, which ran in two main incarnations over the period of 1950 to 1994 (with accompanying annuals). It is strongly associated with its flagship character, Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, (created and illustrated by Frank Hampson in the earlier photogravure format), doing battle against the Mekon and other interplanetary foes.

'Pippin' is entirely fictional and is a bedtime story told to the artists' children about a Tiger Moth and his adventures. An illustration in the artist's journal wrongly shows 'Pippin' in red, but both children put their father right exclaiming that 'Pippin' was of course yellow. Having tracked down and built a period wooden model in yellow, the correctly liveried ‘Pippin’ now hangs from the children’s ceiling between repairs.

P-PP1N is an ex-Polish airforce training Tiger Moth.