Gene Pitney wrote upbeat hits for others - Bobby Vee's "Rubber Ball" (UK no. 4, US no. 6 '61), Ricky Nelson's "Hello Mary Lou" (UK no. 2, US no. 9 '61), the Crystals' "He's a Rebel" (UK no. 19, US no. 1 '62) - but picked other writers' songs for himself that tended to see his composure gradually crumble inside three minutes, whether through love's intensity ("Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa", UK no. 2, US no. 17 '63) or through despair ("I'm Gonna Be Strong", UK no. 2, US no. 9 '64); most extreme of all was 1968's "Billy You're My Friend", a traumatic love triangle that sounded like it was being sung with Gene inside a straitjacket.

Melody Maker, the jazz weekly, hated Colyer's band. He was a purist, a grouchy extremist who thought Louis Armstrong had sold out when he brought a saxophone into his band. His conservatism accidentally beat a new path. What he did with skiffle was to revive a music that was so old it seemed radically new; in this way, he is a forefather to Morrissey - who took the early-sixties, pre-Beatles pop culture to shape the Smiths' image and lyrics - and the indie revolution. What seemed like exotic distance to Ken Colyer seemed very real to people still living in two-up two-downs, in ramshackle Victorian structures with galley kitchens and outdoor toilets. The washboard, the mop, the bucket - these were everyday items in working-class fifties Britain. Transforming them into musical instruments with a few nails and a few screws caught the imagination of kids like a home-made Meccano set.

Some may see more worth in the catalogues of the Doors or the Grateful Dead, but the Turtles encompassed the American sixties - hip, square and freak - and they split, on cue, in 1969 with a baroque ballad called "Lady-O", written by their one-time groupie Judee Sill. In their own grown-up fanboy way, they were as perfect as the Beatles. Their photos just needed a little more touching up.

If you were forced to name your favourite group of all time, then the Beatles would be a hard one to argue with, but so would the KLF. Their catalogue is patchy, deeply flawed, and they never made a consistently strong album. But they showered the crowd at an Oxfordshire rave with £1,000-worth of Scottish pound notes bearing the legend 'Children we love you'. They played at the 1992 Brit Awards with vegan punks Extreme Noise Terror, before picking up guns and firing blanks at the audience. They were independent, euphoric, iconoclastic, and they were enormously successful in 1991.