A really really great pop song by dint of the fact it just refuses any categorisation other than 'Ace'. But I'd better give it a go. 'Mother' is a very nineties mix of genres; Gospel-ey piano, driving pop beat, terrible vocals, and great pop lyrics that soars, taking in scat, madchester, falsetto and more before exhausting itself - I can't think of any other song that could conceivably have worked as a blueprint for 90's pop - if we'd worked from this instead of 'Baby one more time' things could have been much different. Re. the song - two things then - 1. it's a fantastically catchy 'choon' with guts and attitude, 2. it's a bit revolutionary, as all good pop should be.

Ha! Good luck finding this one. Hot little hopes is a storm in a teacup about going out on a night with high expectations by a band who never got the sucess they deserved. The music is sublime; a string and brass waltz that builds to a delirious gallop, but it's the lyrics and their delivery that make it special, and confirm BHJ as a lost treasure. Johnny Brown is a songwriter whose lyrics are great writing in their own right; much of his work reads like documentary, the man has a spectacular talent for transcribing the ordinary while maintaining strict disciplines of structure and story to catch your heart in your throat. Here as elsewhere the story almost doesn't deserve to be told- it's ordinary people with ordinary hopes and fears, but the music and the telling turn it into a modern fairytale.

I'm not just going for the 'most unfashionable song selection' award - this is a great song despite everything. As well as immediately winning me over by being about finding your own secret beach somewhere warm it also manages to be humourous ('...I'm intruiged - I'm insured...') and it's so seductively sung you can't help but be won over. More than that the song's rhythym drives forward at the chorus like a wave, and the overall effect is of being taken to the hidden shore on a rollercoaster.