There's more to the Hollies than the soundtrack to a lager commercial; they've had more hits than the Beatles, and been together longer than the Stones...

NOW 'HE AIN'T HEAVY, He's My Brother' is no longer occupying the number one slot, it seems a fair bet to assume the Hollies will soon sink back into oblivion - the golden-oldie equivalent of one-hit wonders.

But to anybody who knows anything about pop, where it's been, and where it's heading next, the Hollies just can't be written off like that. For a start, there is talk of the band's old record company re-releasing 'The Air That I Breathe' (another classic Hollies hit) as a follow-up single. Second, the band themselves are still "active" and are thinking of recording a completely new song instead - if they can get a new record deal. And lastly, even if neither of those things happen and the band split up tomorrow, the Hollies will still go down in the annals as one of the most important pop acts of the '60s and '70s, and their influence will be felt for years to come.

The band were formed in the fallout of the Beatles' first two hits, 'Love Me Do' and 'Please Please Me' in 1962/3. The Fab Four had shaken the rock 'n' roll world to its foundations with their simple, melodic style, and up and down the country, young musicians were racking their brains trying to think of ways of staying in style. The other "Merseybeat" acts, like Gerry & the Pacemakers, were first on the scene. Then came a similar movement in Manchester (still fashionably "north"), spearheaded by Freddie & the Dreamers and a group of young no-hopers who called themselves - for no particular reason, it seems - the Hollies.

The first Hollies line-up you could call "permanent" was Allan Clarke on lead vocals, Tony Hicks on lead guitar, Graham Nash on rhythm guitar, Eric Haydock on bass and Bobby Elliott on drums. Initially they contented themselves doing club and dancehall gigs in and around Manchester, and wrote very little of their own material, playing mainly cover versions of old American soul numbers.

But what they lacked in original song ideas, the Hollies made up for in their distinctive sound. This revolved around two things: up-front, carefully crafted vocal harmonies (with Hicks singing the bottom line and Nash supplying the top end) and Hicks' intricate guitar playing, faster and less repetitive than most of his contemporaries'.

Two decades before the Portastudio was invented, it was every band's ambition to secure a recording session at a big studio. If the Hollies hadn't managed to get one shortly after Hicks joined, they would never have had the 'chance to "turn pro", let alone become as successful as they did. Yet secure a session they did - two hours at EMI's Abbey Road studios in London. They recorded two songs, a cover of the Coasters' 'Ain't That Just Like Me' and a song Clarke and Nash had written. EMI were sufficiently impressed with the former to cut it as a single, which duly came out on the Parlophone label in April 1963, and was almost completely ignored.

Undeterred, the band tried again with another Coasters cover, 'Searching'. Within weeks it had made the Top 20, and the Hollies became the latest in a long line of groups featuring good-looking, clean-cut boys strumming guitars and smiling blankly at the TV cameras.

There was plenty to admire behind the smiles, though. The Hollies sound was developing rapidly. Hicks' guitar playing was branching out in new directions, his intros to hits like 'Look Through Any Window' and 'Carousel' becoming essential practising material for even aspiring guitarist at the time. He even switched to the banjo for the risque 'Stop, Stop, Stop', a song that told the sorry tale of a young punter being thrown out of a club for lunging at a stripper, and one of the first hits the Hollies actually wrote themselves. Little did Tony Hicks realise that his rapid, forceful style of guitar playing would help inspire a generation of rock axe-thrashers, from Beck, Clapton and Page onwards...

Meanwhile, the Hollies' vocal harmonies were becoming more complex: Graham Nash was reaching ever higher notes (though he never resorted to "falsetto" like the Bee Gees, for example) and he began to sing lead vocals during the "middle eight" of some songs, his husky crooning contrasting with Allan Clarke's tinnier tones.

The hit list got bigger (they had 29 in all, "most of them top ten" according to Hicks), with 'I'm Alive' reaching number one in May '65 and lingering in the charts for a total of 14 weeks; the Hollies didn't get right to the top again until last month.

When the band toured America later in the decade, however, Nash fell in love with the place and the hippy lifestyle that was then dominating Stateside youth culture. Not long afterwards, at the beginning of 1969, a certain celebrated duo called Stephen Stills and David Crosby decided to put the ultimate harmony "supergroup" together, and when they asked Nash to fill the upper registers, he was only too happy to go. Crosby Stills & Nash (as they were imaginatively called) went on to become one of the most popular bands of the hippy era, featuring prominently at such seminal events as the Woodstock open-air rock festival.

The Hollies immediately replaced Nash with Terry Sylvester, formerly lead guitarist with the Swingin' Blue Jeans (of 'Hippy Hippy Shake' fame). Keen to show the world that losing Nash would make no difference to them, the band recorded the utterly dismal 'Sorry Suzanne', which made number three in March '69.

That Autumn, after Crosby Stills & Nash had notched up their first (and only) chart hit with 'Marrakech Express', the Hollies turned their attention to something more serious and recorded 'He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother'. It was not a self-penned number; Hicks recalls that it came to the band via a publisher who specialised in dreadful "Eurovision" songs and who felt the Hollies should be playing soggy slices of Spanish and Italian pop. "It's not for you", he said to Hicks after playing him an early version of 'He Ain't Heavy...', but Hicks saw the potential immediately and insisted the band give it a go. In the studio, Allan Clarke sang it with a passion which made it stand out from the empty, heartless nonsense that filled the charts then and still fills them today - hence the record's ability to be an even bigger hit in '88 than it was in '69, when it got no further than number three.

As the '60s turned into the '70s, however, it became obvious that the post-Nash line-up of the Hollies was lacking the harmonic sparkle of the pre-Nash version, and bit by bit, the band's hits got less frequent and the influence they held over musicians declined. There was plenty of life left in their playing, but a new generation of rock musicians - the likes of Cream, Led Zeppelin, even the Electric Light Orchestra - were doing things Hicks & Co could only dream about, writing songs that were longer, hitting drums harder, playing guitars louder.

The band peaked again early in 1974 with 'The Air That I Breathe', but the next few years saw them struggling through an extended lean spell, and at the turn of the '80s Sylvester left.

Yet the trio at the core of the Hollies - Clarke, Hicks and Elliott - stayed together, surviving glitter pop, pomp rock, punk, funk and Acid House by making a point of doing at least one major live tour every year, backed up by younger musicians from the band Broken English. In 1987, for instance, they made it across Europe, the Far East and Australia. And as this magazine goes to press, they're making their way through a massive list of UK dates - suddenly attracting a much bigger share of the limelight than they'd thought likely when the venues were first booked.

Twenty-five years after that first Abbey Road session, the mass media are back on the Hollies' trail. 'The Sun' have even asked Hicks to appear on page three - an offer he's been happy to decline.