10: THE PRETTY THINGS Come See Me/£.s.d (Fontana, 1966)

I ADORE The Pretty Things. They roared out of much the same London R&B scene that spawned The Rolling Stones, but the best of their early material crackles with an electric charge that leaves the Stones for dust.

Also, at a time when this kind of thing mattered, they had far longer hair and looked genuinely unwholesome and frightful - all surly and baggy-eyed from lack of sleep and nutrition.

You can best believe that they will be appearing again in this list - all of their singles from 1964's Rosalyn to 1970's The Good Mr Square are just magnificent - but for the moment I'm stopping off at Come See Me, written by US soul man JJ Jackson, which only just crawled into the top 50 in 1966.

There's not a great deal to it, in essence, being more or less a rehash of the time-honoured Everybody Needs Somebody To Love riff. What makes it is a monumental performance from all concerned and a production that blows the song right out of the speakers and straight into your lap.

It sounds as thought it was cut at an extremely high level: even when the five stabbing chords that form the song's intro drop away, John Stax's bass on its own sounds like the grinding of tectonic plates as the earth shakes apart.

The song also boasts the most irresistibly thick and vibey groove I've ever heard. I was once asked to host a student disco in the early 1980s and I dutifully stuck on loads of songs which were in the charts at the time, to no avail whatsoever. The dancefloor remained resolutely untroubled until, out of boredom and desperation, I stuck on something I actually wanted to hear, which was Come See Me.

Instantly, the dancefloor was rammed - a glowing testament to the song's exultant power, given that few if any of the people present could have heard it before owing to its inexplicable obscurity.

Incidentally, the B-side, £.s.d, coyly prefigures the obsessions of the psychedelic era as Phil May drawls "I need LSD" - but did he really mean pounds, shillings and pence or was he talking about Albert Hoffmann's fearful invention? Or both?

I'm saying both. Listen to the warped textures of 1968's SF Sorrow, then consider how few copies it sold...