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Those that almost made it:

The Beatles: Come Together, You've Got To Hide Your Love Away, A Day In The Life.

Bob Dylan: Knocking On Heaven's Door, Stuck Inside in Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again.

Eagles: Hotel California.

Rolling Stones: Let It Bleed, Sympathy For The Devil.

Jethro Tull : Aqualung.

My Five is a personal list of the five greatest tracks in popular music. It will appear on this day every week

John Lennon

Imagine

Because no other song has attained such an anthemic status. Because it so politically correct to believe that rock’s music’s greatest track was written by a middle-aged peace-loving hippie.

And finally, because if you can’t bring yourself to pin this tag on a song created by The Beatles, then the next best thing is do this on something composed by one of them.

The lyrics are sentimental to point of sheer soppiness and the melody, knitted together with simple strings and a forlorn piano, flirts dangerously with being cloying and self-obsessive. But with his nasal voice and that recognisably hard edge (which singularly saved The Beatles from being mere purveyors of fruity pop), Lennon elevates the song to a magical place and, of course, to cult status.

Queen

No other seven-minute track has created such a heterogeneous field of sound or exists across such diverse musical registers.

The Beatles (Hey Jude) and the Stones (You Can’t Always Get What You Want) experimented with choir vocals, but Queen took this much further in their magnum opus, with its splendidly irreverent operatic section, which – improbably – melds seamlessly with the elements of ballad and rock.

It is exaggerated, overblown, and reeks of satisfied self-importance. If Freddie Mercury is able pull off something as ludicrously embroidered as this, it is because he and the band never seem to take anything seriously.

The song’s refrain ‘Nothing really matters’ seems to capture their ability to make light of even screaming pomposity.

Wish You Were Here

This one just about manages to pip Floyd's other great track dedicated to its original frontman Syd Barrett (Shine On You Crazy Diamond). Wish You Were Here is markedly less ambitious and extravagant than Shine On_, but it wins out because of its effortless lyricism and its breezy instrumental brilliance.

This ode to Barrett, who slipped into madness, is in some ways a departure from Floyd's own style _ the stereophonic hypnotism that held their best-selling album (Dark Side Of The Moon) together or the wailing and psychedelia that one associates with them.

Bob Marley

Ignore the influence of Marley’s Rastafarian beliefs on this folk song about slavery and emancipation and focus on the music.

Rarely, has something so deceptively simple been written in the history of popular music and Marley’s seminal track – backed by a chord-driven acoustic guitar – is sad, haunting, hopeful and stunningly poignant.

Nothing so stripped down has sounded so evocative or has survived for so long.

It is mystifying how someone who could have written mush such as Vincent or immensely slight songs such as Driedel could have produced such a masterpiece.

In structure, McLean’s tribute to Bud Holly, is a splendid epic in the songwriterly tradition of the Eagles’ Hotel California, which it nudged off this list. Its Dylanesque lyrics, its edgy nostaligic tone, its soft yearning for a lost innocence combine to lend this track its exquisite quality.

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