The last thing I want is to sound like Harry Connick Jr!The song on the album that Tommy

"The last thing I want is to sound like Harry Connick Jr!"The song on the album that Tommy is most proud of is "Bad Days", a wistful, meandering ballad with a typically skewed middle section redolent of the Pulp Fiction sound track. "I know I've written a good song, if it feels like somebody else's when we play it live," he says. "I'm not being big- headed, though," he adds quickly, "It's more, like, `hang on, I'm crap, where did this come from?"Although Tommy stresses that the song is about other people that he's lost, rather than his dad, his father does figure in the story behind the song. "It was kind of inspired by `Everybody's Talking', the old Nilsson track from Midnight Cowboy, he explains. "Sometimes me dad and I would listen to that when we'd had a few beers, and we'd cry together. At first we'd be a bit embarrassed, but then we wouldn't care."There's a few moments' silence, then Tommy brings the interview to its natural conclusion "We really try our best, you know; we're not just chancers. It could all stop tomorrow, and we're very aware of that."`Tom Jones' is released by Gut records on 23 February The album `Tin Planet' follows on 9 March..

You've heard the question scores of times: "What was the Beatles' first number one?" Trouble is, you will also have heard the answer, the wrong answer: "From Me to You". Today we're going to celebrate - or, at least, I'm going to celebrate - the 35th anniversary of the Beatles' first number one: "Please Please Me". Nowadays, we take our knowledge of past chart performances from The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles. From 1952 to 1960 the compilers used the weekly charts published in New Musical Express, after which they switched to Record Retailer. In 1969, a Top 50 was complied jointly for Record Retailer and the BBC by the British Market Research Bureau, and we have effectively had an official chart since that time. Before then, it did not exist. In the Sixties weekly charts were published in New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Disc and Record Mirror, the last-named printing the one from the trade paper, Record Retailer. NME had the largest circulation and was regarded as the standard by music fans, although neither we, nor anyone else, had any idea which was most accurately compiled.

Unlike TV viewing figures, however, there were only minor differences, so I suspect that there was little of the chart hyping that was to take place in the Seventies.The most intriguing differences surround the number one position. By my reckoning, 14 records topped the NME chart and failed to make number one in Record Retailer, peaking at number two or three or, in the case of Tom Jones's "Help Yourself", at number five. Joe Brown is understandably miffed when reporters tell him that "A Picture of You" peaked at number two "I hate that book," he says of the Guinness publication. "It has deprived me of my only number one, and I'm unlikely to get another."The Allisons came second in the 1961 Eurovision Song Contest with "Are You Sure?" According to Guinness, the record also made number two, but they had the first missing number one, as they topped the NME chart for two weeks in April 1961. Are you sure? Yes, I'm absolutely positive.Moving to 1962, Acker Bilk had a missing chart-topper with his TV theme, "Stranger on the Shore", and another trad musician, Kenny Ball, topped the NME chart with "The March of the Siamese Children" from The King and I. Chubby Checker's "Let's Twist Again" sounds like a number one in anyone's book, but it only reached number two in Record Retailer. This is because the two sides of the Record Retailer number one, "Can't Help Falling in Love", and "Rock a Hula Baby", were shown separately in the NME Top 10, thus causing Elvis to suffer from a slipped disc.