The other day I was channel surfing and came across a really terrible British pop documentary from 1965 called "Pop Gear", directed by Frederick Goode and hosted by Jimmy Saville. It featured the Four Pennies, the Animals, The Nashville Teens, The Beatles and a lot of very terrible dancers and middle-aged performers singing the standards that glutted the British pop charts at the time. I couldn't help but wonder how we all managed to get SO excited by what was being generated by the British record companies at that time. Certainly there were some very good acts, but most of them were major snores rehashing skiffle and standards. What makes me even more worried is that most of this stuff seemed more exciting then what was happening in the U.S. at the same time. When Dean Martin kicked the Beatles out of the number one spot with "Everybody Needs Somebody Sometime". Man those were the days.

You're right; those dreadful UK covers of US hits still dominated but that was why young kids in the UK were starting to make their own music instead of covering the hits from America.
The first record I bought (or my Mum did for me) was Singing The Blues but we had to go to dozens of shops until we found the Guy Mitchell original instead of the awful Tommy Steele cover.

A particularly dire example on yesterday's Pick Of The Pops: Jimmy Justice massacring "Spanish Harlem."