Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry

Through the 1960s, the songs of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich stood as the epitome of pop.

They eschewed the (relative) social commentary and Broadway arrangements of their fellow married writing couples (Goffin and King, Mann and Weil) for topics that suited their own personalities: deliriously dizzy pronouncements of love, loyalty, lust, and - on those rare occasions when their artists, almost entirely female-fronted, needed a change of tact - loss, too.

The tunes were, typically, similarly upbeat, and none the worse for it. Not only did Barry and Greenwich write some of the most blatantly commercial songs of that decade, but some of the most enduring, too.