You're the Best Thing by The Style Council

What the hell happened to Paul Weller in the early eighties? One minute he was the angry young front-man of one of Britain's premier punk/mod bands, and the next he was making cheesy wine-bar music that even Sade would have been ashamed of. Although Weller's lyrics were still lefty and political, the impact was reduced somewhat by burying them in the kind of jazz/white soul fusion that yuppies enjoyed listening to while sipping Babycham and poncy cocktails. Style Council even called one of their albums Cafe Bleu, a name that just reeks of eighties dad-music like Chris Rea and Mark Knopfler. 'You're the Best Thing' is a tedious, indulgent, durge-like song that outstays its welcome and induces recurring nightmares of shoulder-pads, braces and Tab Clear.

Crap lyric: "I could runaway but I'd rather stay/In the warmth of your smile lighting up my day"

Verdict: I hate to say it, but even 'You're the Best Thing' by crap 90s group D:Ream was better than this.

Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum

You know this song from the unmistakable tinny keyboard intro, and from there on in it's just total trippy nonsense. It's one of those tracks that probably evokes huge nostalgic feeling in people who were young at the time (and who were smoking almost as pot as the Harum surely were themselves), but it has dated almost as badly as Miami Vice and Hi-Karate. Maybe it's because I've heard 'Whiter Shade of Pale' so many times that I dislike it so much, or maybe it's just because the lyrics are so irritating if you're sober. It plays out like a bad nightmare, one of those ones where everything is out of sync and becomes more and more bizarre as you progress through the horror. Actually, reading the lyrics, I can't even remember the last two verses - perhaps these were cut from the single version because it was already too overblown and pretentious. "Come on, lads," the engineer said to the wannabe prog-rockers, "Does anyone actually listen to this bobbins?" Whenever I think of this song I also think about 'Nights in White Satin' by The Moody Blues, which is similarly pompous, and which will no doubt feature in this blog before too long. My fiance and I had a discussion about which track is worse - he picked Justin Hayward and his gang, and I went for this, but it's a tough call.

Crap lyrics: "She said, 'There is no reason and the truth is plain to see.'/But I wandered through my playing cards and would not let her be"

Verdict: Numerous shades of crap.

You'll Never Get to Heaven if You Break My Heart by The Stylistics

Pretty much anything by The Stylistics could have been on this list, but 'You'll Never Get to Heaven' makes it by virtue of it tormenting me during my days working for a well-known high street bookstore. It was on a Burt Bacharach double CD, which was played seemingly on a loop for a few months. The whole time I actually thought it was a woman singing - I can't sing that high, so I don't know how any man manages it (although the trousers were quite tight in the seventies.) There's lots of high-pitched crooning and la-la-las, and some lyrics that are so cheesy you could serve them up with crackers and grapes. The meandering, bland tune is almost hypnotic, and the band sound so wussy that they would probably lose a fight against The Nolans. The only thing The Stylistics are useful for is Radio 2's Pop Master quiz; when the winner gets through to the '3 in 10' round, it's almost guaranteed that The Stylistics will come up.

Crap lyric: " If you ever should say goodbye/I'd feel so awful the angels would cry"

Verdict: If breaking your heart means that you'll shut up, I'll take the risk of going to Hell instead.

Can I Touch You...There? by Michael Bolton

Oh good God, this is truly awful. No-one in their right mind thinks Michael Bolton is in any way cool or a credible musical artiste, but there was absolutely no need for him to inflict this horror on an unsuspecting world. 'Can I Touch You...There?' is both hilarious and repulsive- and you know that the answer has to be an unequivocal 'no'. What woman would want the then-mulleted Bolton going anywhere near her, let alone allowing him to touch her 'deep inside'? The funny thing was that one of my best friends at university had this song as a CD single - she had actually spent her adolescent cash on it, though she always claimed she bought it for the B-side, a vile cover version of 'Sitting on the Dock of the Bay'. What wasn't so funny was that she gave it to me as an amusing present, and I discovered it again the other day while I was going through things to throw out. Unsurprisingly, the only thing that Mikey B will soon be touching is the inside of a landfill site - I thought about giving it to a charity shop, but I think the dreadfulness has to end somewhere.

Creepy lyric: Can I touch you there, touch you deep inside/Can I touch your heart, the way you're touchin' mine/Can I touch you there, touch you deep within, oh/Can I touch you there, can I touch you oh...

Verdict: This CD should have come with a free soap and scourer.