I'm late posting again because although I've known for a week what I intended the post to be about, I found when I sat down to write that I couldn't organise my material.

This "material" was a list of favourite pieces of music ranging from pops to classics. I started writing down all my best loved titles, but when I got to over thirty I realised I had an unmanageable mess. How could I classify a list that contains such diverse items as El Condor Pasa, Atom Heart Mother, Brahms's Violin Concerto in D and Fields of Gold? I stayed up until 2.00am on Monday morning, listening to extracts from my favourites in various arrangements, trying to sort them out into a top ten or even a top twenty and couldn't. In the end I gave up went to bed, disgruntled.

But the project has haunted my mind ever since, and although I'm no closer to sorting out that messy catalogue of musical favourites, I do know that my four top faves never change. The rest of the never-ending list varies according to my mood, but the top four remain the top four and have for years. Decades, even.

And what are these four super-faves? Why, they are Pachelbel's Canon in D; The Grand Pas de Deux from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, the British folksong Greensleeves (in just about any version) and - wait for it - Unchained Melody.

I've always wondered why this song bore such a strange name, and the very comprehensive Wikipedia article cleared up the mystery. "Unchained" was the name of the film in which the melody first appeared in 1955. The music was by Alex North and the lyrics by Hy Zaret. It's been recorded hundreds of times, but never better, I think, than the original version by baritone Todd Duncan, which I fell in love with when I was twelve years old - because it's a damned good tune.

Tunes, dear friends, are what grab me. I love a good vocal melody that you can hum, whistle, extemporise on and generally muck about with and still have a perfectly good tune when you've finished. Short of being tone deaf and gravel-throated, you can't spoil a good tune. (Well, some jazz musos can, but they generally don't play music for the tune; in fact, some of them just can't wait to get rid of it.)

A good tune is a simple thing, made more beautiful, for sure, by harmony, rhythm or words - but it doesn't rely on these things to carry it along. Music that relies on anything but a good melody as its mainstay either bores or irritates me. Gimme the tune, man, just gimme the tune.

So you will not be surprised when I tell you that the Long List contains a lot of folk music, or pieces based on folk music such as Ralph Vaughan-Williams's Fantasia on Greensleeves and Variations on Dives and Lazarus. Medieval and early Baroque loom large, too: little gems such as Manfredina, which dates from the C14, or snatches of plainsong such as the evocative Hodie that Benjamin Britten grabbed for his Ceremony of Carols have truly lovely melodies, for all their simplicity. Religious music that grew out of this early tradition, such as the magnificent masses of Palestrina, are well up the list, too. Popular music that draws on the folk tradition fits in well here: things like Sting's fabulous Fields of Gold. (Sting plays a mean lute as well, as his recent album of John Dowland pieces demonstrates. Again, simple, sing-able tunes.)

Another place to look for good tunes is the theatre. Opera and ballet abound in them: so do musicals. When we think of Cats, do we think of the costumes and lighting and the acrobatics of the performers - or do we remember the grungy little grey cat standing in the lamplight singing "Memory"? "One Fine Day" pretty much sums up Madam Butterfly and "In the Depths of the Temple" does the same for The Pearl Fishers. Bizet, Verdi, Puccini - fine tunesmiths, all of them, as were the best ballet composers including Tchaikovsky himself, the melody king.

A lot of this music is, of course, hackneyed. It has been transposed, transcribed and transfigured until musical purists shudder to hear it - but Manfredina played on a mouth organ or mixed by midi still remains Manfredina. You just can't keep a good tune down.