27: Nick Straker Band, “A Walk in the Park” (no.20, 1980)

When it comes to white boy disco, we think automatically of KC and his Sunshine Band, but spare a thought for British-born Straker, who - at the height of disco - went out to clear his head, and came back with this neglected masterpiece of pop-dance fusion. So simple was “A Walk in the Park”’s conceit - it is, essentially, just a song about a bloke going for a stroll - that it could pass through several permutations: a minor hit across Europe at the end of the 1970s, it then enjoyed a second life during the 80s as a hi-NRG anthem in gay clubs, where the idea of going for a walk in the park presumably took on a whole other significance. 25 years after its original release, it was reclaimed, with wearying irony (and inevitable promo-video chauvinism, hardly justified by the “seek[ing] a straighter path” lyric) as a flimsy remixed floor-filler: a bit like going for a walk in the park, and coming back with dog poo on your trainers.

28: New Radicals, “You Get What You Give” (no.5, 1999)

Before we all start wailing and gnashing our teeth about the low placement: yes, it’s a great song. A feelgood classic. An anthem for a generation, if we must. But before we rush to canonise blinking Moby-alike writer-performer Gregg Alexander as one of pop’s great professors - an individual who, with his revolving coterie of jobbing-muso technicians, here finally hit upon the right formula for moment-defining pop - consider the following counter-evidence.

Alexander disbanded the New Radicals shortly after this sole UK chart hit, citing tiredness with the group’s touring and promotional duties, only to then take up a second career as a songwriter-for-hire. As well as penning the only Texas song to sound remotely exciting (for 27 seconds, before it reveals itself to be a Texas song), the not-so-New Radical then went on to write (God help us) Ronan Keating’s “Life is a Rollercoaster”. From “You Get What You Give”’s climactic flurry of threats (“Fashion shoots with Beck and Hanson/Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson/You’re all fakes, run to your mansions/Come around, we’ll kick your ass in”) to Ronan’s impossibly weedy “You really got me going tonight/You almost got us punched in a fight” seems a precipitous decline: just whose side was Alexander on, exactly?

29: Strawberry Switchblade, “Since Yesterday” (no.5, 1984)

It’s remarkable how small the world of great one-hit wonders is, once you put it under the microscope; it’s as though only a handful of individuals have truly grasped what it is to make timeless one-off hits. (Call them The Timelords, if you will.) This still-adorable slice of heartfelt and - in every sense - dottily idiosyncratic Scots pop forms the missing link between Postcard Records (the Caledonian indie label who gave the world Orange Juice and Aztec Camera) and Bis; indeed, “the Switchblade”, as I’m sure almost no-one referred to them at the time, were once signed to the former, before falling under the managerial hand of none other than - yes, him again - Bill Drummond, in another of his pre-KLF guises. (The band’s name derived from the title of an Orange Juice fanzine.)

Even back in 1984, “Since Yesterday” sounded like a song acutely aware of the melancholy effects of listening to the music of one’s formative years; 26 - yes, 26 - years on, it sounds no less heart-rending beneath its deliciously sugary top-layer. Success came at a price for the group: landed with a huge tax bill after the success of the single, Strawberries Ann Bryson and Rose McDowell were obliged to return to the studio to record more tracks for the Japanese market - where, inevitably, their distinctive handmade costuming had attracted the greatest attention - before going their separate ways to pursue careers in music and, natch, fashion design.

30: The Rocksteady Crew, “(Hey You) The Rocksteady Crew” (no.6, 1983)

Not a group so much as a genuine gang - a collective that were to the Bronx and breakdancing what the Globetrotters were to Harlem and basketball - and one that still survives to this day in one form or another. As shameless cash-ins on passing crazes go, this one’s unusually fresh and charming, a real time-capsule of a song: clock how unschooled and self-conscious the Crew are when asked to do anything other than flips and turns in the video. The idea that breaking was anything other than a fad proved hard to shake off, no matter how many windmills, flares and pikes its practitioners sallied forth, no matter how many times white boys in provincial Midlands towns rented “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo” on VHS: follow-up single “Uprock” limped to a lowly 64 in the UK, and following what are described as “difficult contract negotiations” (I’ll bet), the Crew and their record company went their separate ways. The suits involved have since disappeared without a trace, but the tracksuits - along with their descendants and protégés - are still out on the streets somewhere even today.

31: Doublé, “The Captain of Her Heart” (no.8, 1986)

In “We Could Have Been the Wombles”, his entertaining study of the one-hit wonder form, the author Tom Bromley describes this soulful, continent-hopping sensation from Swiss duo Double (pronounced, naturellement, doo-blay) as “Toblerone Sade”, which - though a nice spot of phrasemaking - suggests “The Captain of Her Heart” is rather too smooth and processed for its own good. It’s a lovely, cleansing song, all the same: like eating chocolate on your own on a Saturday night off the back of a lengthy crying jag.

Worth contrasting the two different versions of the video: the European one holds firmly to the song’s after-dark-in-the-jazz-club vibe, complete with clarinets and bubbles, while the MAKE-ME-A-HIT American promo goes (and who can blame it?) for pretty girls with 80s eyebrows staring dreamily into the middle distance, and comically literal dockside action. Vocalist Kurt Maloo is still doing the circuit as a solo singer, but pianist Felix Haug died of a heart attack, aged 52, in 2004 - making “The Captain of Her Heart” even more of a melancholy experience now than it ever was.

32: Sugarhill Gang, “Rapper’s Delight” (no.3, 1979)

Steal any bassline from a Chic track, and you can’t go wrong, really. The first gold single by a hip-hop act, though it was clear UK audiences still weren’t quite sure what to make of it all: I can understand singles-buyers being more comfortable with Blondie’s “Rapture” - an assimilation of freestyle form by a long-established (and, it has to be noted, entirely Caucasian) act - but it’s simply unfathomable that the Gang’s magnificent seven-inch follow-up “Apache” never charted over here.

“Rapper’s Delight”, of course, remains as fresh and inspirational as ever, a tune to win everybody over: whether grandmas and Adam Sandler sceptics (as in The Wedding Singer), and Chic’s Nile Rodgers, who threatened copyright action on first encountering the track in a New York nightclub, only to later declare it “one of [his] favourite songs of all time”. (On a related note, I used to cower every time I was subjected to Las Ketchup’s novelty smash “The Ketchup Song” (no.1, 2002) until I realised the chorus was a Hispanic-nonsense of the “Rapper’s Delight” refrain.) An indisputable party favourite that delivers everything that bassline promises: good times.