![]() It was everywhere: on the radio, television, juke boxes, and firmly glued into people’s brains - an early example of the earworm. Its combination of girly vocal intonation, galloping offbeat rhythm, sugary lyrics, and harmonica interlude was infuriatingly infectious. It was also quite unlike anything that most British pop fans had ever heard before. It was impossible in the chilly, grey spring of 1964 to escape the sound of “My Boy Lollipop”, Small’s first and only UK hit of fifty years ago. Youth was in the ascendancy against the geriatric political establishment - and no one was more youthful than the seventeen-year-old Jamaican Millie Small. Mods and rockers were fighting to a rock-and-roll soundtrack on south coast beaches, while the Rolling Stones had reached the Top 5 for the first time. The Beatles ruled the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, their triumph memorialised by newly unveiled waxworks in Madame Tussauds. If news was stale, music at least was fresh and exciting. The Conservative government, led by the aristocratic Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was on its last legs, and economic malaise prevailed. The swinging 60s had yet to really arrive, the Cold War loomed ominously in news bulletins, and industrial action by power workers threatened to turn off the lights. ![]()
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