What is the biggest-selling single ever released by a rock band?
Rock and roll has never been known to be the most tasteful genre in the world.
As much as people like the idea of living out their fantasies of channelling Marty McFly playing Chuck Berry tunes every time they watch Back to the Future, rock and roll has always thrived on the outskirts of the mainstream a lot of the time. But every now and again, the stars align for bands to make tunes that will resonate for generations to come.
Then again, it’s hard to really get the world too invested in an entire band of people rather than solo artists. If you look at the biggest names in popular music and the biggest historical chart-toppers, a lot of them are usually either on their own or have a team of people backing them up to make some of their finest material. Michael Jackson may have been one of the kings of all popular music, but there was no way he was going to reach the top without everyone from Quincy Jones to Teddy Riley on some of his classics.
That applies to the biggest rock stars as well. If you look at the highest-charting singles of all time, the ones that sold the most tend to either be supergroups like Band Aid or solo artists like Elton John. Each of their respective songs may have resonated with millions of people, but rock and roll wasn’t always about being a singles market, either. Jimmy Page vowed that Led Zeppelin would be judged on their albums rather than their singles, but there’s no arguing with the perfect rock and roll tune now and again.
The Rolling Stones already had ‘Satisfaction’ out as a single when they first got started, and even in the CD age, there are bound to be people who bought Nirvana’s Nevermind solely for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ rather than worrying about any of the other songs on the record. In that realm, though, there aren’t too many bands that can really argue with what The Beatles brought to the hit parade.
The Fab Four are still among the most decorated stars in rock and roll history, and it’s no shocker that a lot of their finest songs, like ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, still rank among the highest-selling singles of all time. But even with a band with that much history, they were no match for what Scorpions did when they released ‘Winds of Change’ at the dawn of the 1990s.
While artists like Elton John may have reached even higher with his re-recorded version of ‘Candle in the Wind’ or Bill Haley with ‘Rock Around the Clock’, the German heavyweights hold the record for the highest-selling single by a rock band at 14million copies sold. But there’s a lot more gravity to the song if you know where everyone was coming from around that time.
Scorpions had already been a global band making some of the greatest heavy metal tunes of the 1980s, but since this was made around the time of the Berlin Wall being torn down, this may as well have been a song of celebration. All of those years of division would have done a number on anyone, but Klaus Meine’s tender voice on this song was like extending a hand of friendship to those who had been on the other side for years.
The band even managed to double down on the celebration as well, performing the song during the tenth anniversary of the wall coming down and even appearing as the surrogate band during Roger Waters’s performance of The Wall at the site, where they offered up their own version of ‘In the Flesh’ to kick off the show. But beyond the actual politics of the situation, ‘Wind of Change’ was about more than a catchy tune. It was about bringing people together, and that’s the kind of sentiment that anyone could get behind.
