Strange folk, lost pop, disco oddities and, um, Dido – here are the forgotten tracks that became this year’s most replayed revelations
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I grew up listening to the Mamas and the Papas’ hits but had never heard their albums before this year. I had no idea anything as creepy as Mansions lurked within their sunny oeuvre. Its sound is ominous, its mood one of stoned paranoia, its subject rich hippies sequestered in the titular luxury homes, haunted by the sensation that the flower-power dream is going wrong.
The weirdest thing about it is its eerie prescience. A year after its release, a group of people not too dissimilar to those depicted in the song found out just how wrong the 60s counterculture could go. The spectre of the Manson murders hangs chillingly over the track, compounded by the fact that, on their eponymous 1966 album, the Mamas and the Papas recorded Strange Young Girls, about precisely the kind of lost souls that Charles Manson would ultimately convince to do the devil’s work. A minor but thoroughly unsettling slice of buried pop history. Alexis Petridis
