“Wild Thing” by Troggs

Chip Taylor, an American songwriter, dashed off "Wild Thing" in next to no time: the chorus arrived within a couple of minutes, and what came out was, by his own description, a song with a sexual kind of feeling. The Wild Ones cut it first in 1965 and got nowhere with it. It took the Troggs, a British band, to turn it into a garage rock stomper the following year.

Their version, issued on Fontana in 1966, stalled at number two in the UK but went all the way to the top in America, and it has never stopped echoing. Rolling Stone ranked it at 257 on its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs, and musicians of every stripe have taken a swing at it since.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.