If you learn to play guitar or piano you will probably end up with a repertoire, a set of songs that you can play for your own amusement, or to entertain others. It might consist of just two or three songs but it’s still a repertoire. If you can only play one song, then you have a party piece rather than a repertoire.

The phrase “two-song repertoire” has been on my mind in recent weeks. It’s in the lyrics of “Rock ’N Roll (I gave you the best years of my life)” by Kevin Johnson, a #23 hit here in the UK in 1975. I never had direct access to it (not even a recording taped from the radio), and until this month hadn’t heard it for years, but found that I remembered pretty much every verse when I searched for it online. Check out this performance on YouTube. You can hear the line “And my family listened 50 times to my two-song repertoire” in the first 30 seconds. I had no idea what Kevin Johnson looked like until now. He never appeared on “Top of the Pops”, or any other UK TV show as far as I know.

Over the last 30 years my own repertoire has grown from two songs that I played all the time (“With a little help from my friends” and “What a wonderful world”) to a few hundred, some of which I haven’t played for years. Since last autumn I have been playing most months at a friend’s Open Mic night in Hammersmith, calling myself “Number One Guy” (or “#1 Guy”) to indicate that my repertoire consists mostly of songs that reached #1 in the UK charts. Give me a year between 1953 and 2015 and I’ll sing you at least one song that topped the UK charts in that year. I have been keeping a scribbled record on an A2 sheet of the years that have been covered so far. It looks like this.

Some of the years have been crossed off thanks to performances by other people, without any prompting from me. Last week, for example, one of the regular performers covered Sam Smith’s “Writing’s on the wall” from 2016. [Correction, September 2019: This was a #1 in 2015, and to date nobody has performed a #1 from 2016. I aim to do so in October.]  It’s the only Bond theme to top the UK charts. She also covered “Eternal Flame” and Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”. That’s 1989, 2001 and 2003 sorted, although I had already dealt with 2001 the previous month with a rendition of “Lady Marmalade”, which also serves for 1998. Yes, I allow the same song to cover multiple years if it reached #1 more than once, in different releases or re-releases. When a song topped the charts at Christmas it is only counted for the year it hit the top, not the following year as well.

Below, with more detail than the scribbled A2 sheet you can see above, is a table showing the progress we have made so far: 35 years down, 29 to go. Like other lists on this Blog I hope to keep this one up-to-date. If not, it’s simply a snapshot of where we are in April 2019.

May 2019 Update: 3 more songs played, 5 more years covered, 40 years down, 24 to go.

June 2019 Update: 5 years covered by 2 songs performed by me, and 3 years covered by “You’ll never walk alone”, performed by a chap from Liverpool. Another singer covered “Only you”, the Christmas #1 from 1983. I had previously performed “They don’t know” from that year, in honour of Kirsty McColl, who wrote it. (Tracey Ullman’s version got to #2.) I have now expanded my repertoire to include all 66 complete years of UK chart history, 1953-2018 inclusive. I have played (or sung along with someone else’s performance) #1 songs from 48 of these years. 48 down, 18 to go.

July 2019 Update: 3 years covered by 3 songs performed by me (1957, 1965, 1987) and 2 covered by 2 songs by other performers (2006, 2008). 53 years down, 13 to go.

August 2019 update: 4 years covered by me (1956, 2018, 1991, 1992) and another (2004) covered by a magnificent finale: “With a little help from my friends” played by most of the musicians in the room. It was also a #1 in 1968 and 1988 but those years had already been covered. Earlier in the evening we had a rendition of “See my baby jive”, a 1973 #1, but that year had also been covered, back in April.

September 2019 update: 6 songs covered by me, 3 in each half of the show. In the first half: 2011, with a friend helping out on vocals, 2009, 1986. In the second half: 1982, 1999, 2000. 63 years covered, only songs from 3 years to go (1981, 1997, 2016).

October 2019 update: The list is complete, with songs from 2016, 1997 and 1981, in that order.

Songs arranged in order of when they reached #1

Songs arranged in order of when they were performed at the Open Mic evenings (once a month)