All the same, in 1971 it made an unlikely pop star of a then 26-year-old folk and rock ‘n’ roll artist from New York state called Don McLean, topping the charts in the US and all over Europe, though it went only to No 2 here in the UK. Weighing in at over eight-and-a-half minutes long and sporting no fewer than six densely worded, imagery-laden verses, American Pie is by no means your average pop song. The singer-songwriter aimed to craft “a big song” about “a modern America” and ended up delivering an eight-and-a-half-minute folk-rock phenomenon