Vera Lynn's in there, so is Beyoncé. But where does David Bowie rank? The Telegraph's music critic picks his all-time favourites

As a fan, musician and critic, songs form the very ground of my life, a constant soundtrack to my interior world, a source of inspiration and consolation as well as old-fashioned entertainment. At the heart of a song is a mystery, the way it interacts with the memories and experience of the listener to become something intensely personal. More than any other form of artistic expression, people claim songs as their own.

For me, a great song is about melody and lyric dovetailing together to become more than the sum of their parts, evoking ideas and emotions. It is not the same as a great record, which has so much to do with arrangement, performance, context. A truly great song takes on a kind of intrinsic life of its own. Its genius manifests when sung a cappella, by anyone, from a towering vocalist to an amateur alone in the shower.

Part of the beauty of a song is the way we share it, so I have tried to reflect that by celebrating songs everybody knows. Some are karaoke standards, the songs we sing to make sense of our lives, while some have a different kind of greatness, pushing further and deeper in recalling experience.