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As Brian played King Curtis' 'Soul Twist' this week, we thought it was a good opportunity for Bob Stanley to investigate the history of the Twist phenomenon.

Rock'n'roll had always laid a heavy emphasis on dancing, from Danny & the Juniors' At The Hop to Jimmy McCracklin's The Walk, but the Chubby Checker-initiated twist explosion of the early sixties led to dozens of records about the dance, and plenty more about less well remembered moves. Partners dancing apart seemed an incredible new innovation. "It caught like a forest blaze" according to Frank Sinatra, and before too long the likes of Jackie Onassis and Truman Capote were seen twisting at New York's Peppermint Lounge.

The trend started with R&B act Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, and their US no.7 hit Finger Poppin' Time in 1960, which they followed with half a dozen more hits about dances or parties. One of these was The Twist, which would have climbed higher than no.28 if it hadn't been covered by former chicken plucker Ernest Evans, aka Chubby Checker (a nickname which came from his resemblance to Fats Domino). Chubby's cover got to no.1, starting a dance craze that gave us The Bristol Stomp (The Dovells), Mashed Potato Time (Dee Dee Sharp), The Watusi (The Vibrations) and Pony Time (Chubby again, his second US number one) in 1961.

In Britain, Petula Clark's Ya Ya Twist was a variation on Lee Dorsey's Ya Ya (which was too slow to twist to) and Frankie Vaughan's Don't Stop Twist was his no.22 follow-up to Tower Of Strength. There were plenty of opportunist twist records, none more so than Elvis's Rock a Hula Baby, it's full title being Rock a Hula Baby (Twist). I mean, you could twist to it, but popping sacroiliacs weren't mentioned in the lyric anywhere. Other American twist hits included efforts from old timers like Count Basie (The Basie Twist), Perez Prado (The Patricia Twist), the Chipmunks (The Alvin Twist), the Champs (Tequila Twist), Fabian (Kissin' and Twistin'), and Santo and Johnny (Twistin' Bells). All of these records reached Billboard's Hot Hundred at the height of the twist craze. Things got so heated that Chubby Checker's 1960 hit went back to number one in the States in November 1961.

Sam Cooke's joyous Twisting The Night Away was good enough to outlive the craze, and is still receiving regular radio play, but maybe the greatest - or worst, depending on your point of view - twist cash-in came from Frank Sinatra. He couldn't even blame his record company for railroading him into recording Everybody's Twistin', seeing as Reprise was his own label. "They had to have something new, so someone started twisting" sang an unconvinced Frank - the song's a lot of fun if imagined as a party scene from an imaginary 1962 movie, maybe starring James Garner and Kim Novak. Frank's yell at the very end of the song, however, is mildly terrifying.