69: Cherry Ghost, “People Help the People” (no.27, 2007)

A provisional one-hit wonder: after a long delay caused by label issues and the general Cowellification of the music business, the second album from this Bolton group named for a Wilco lyric finally hit record shops (or iTunes, as is the way of the world these days) in July 2010. This beautifully produced second single from the band’s debut album “Thirst for Romance” won the Ivor Novello for Best Contemporary Song in 2008, and perhaps owes some of its success to what we might call the Elbow effect: a growing fondness for keening Northern melancholia featuring cherishably atypical lyrical cadences, and piano chords that strike to the very depths of your being. If your heart doesn’t fracture even slightly during the line about “a thousand slowly dying sunsets”, then you simply don’t have one to be broken.