The completely forgotten song that spent 11 weeks in the top 10 in 1976
A glance at the 1976 singles that stuck around the longest on the UK top 10 indeed offers an explanation as to why punk happened.
There’s a fantastic mismatch of generational mood and what Top of the Pops had to offer. When discussing the new wave’s insurrectionary burn in the late 1970s, it’s all too easy to start writing rock and roll cliches and well-trodden pop lore of ‘punk killed prog’ narratives, but 1976’s big hitters look bewilderingly irrelevant to the social malaise and dead-end ennui fogging the country and fuelling the youth seethe.
As ever, most people weren’t punks, just as the beats, hippies, Teddy boys, and free ravers only ever marked a minority of each generation’s sub-cultural expression. While ‘Anarchy in the UK’ saw the Sex Pistols’ debut peak at a respectable 38 on that year’s singles chart, most people were nabbing copies of novelty rock and roll lampooners Showaddywaddy, Brotherhood of Man’s Eurovision kitsch, and Chicago’s soft rock snooze, all spending a comfortable nine+ weeks in the top 10.
The longest is Queen’s chamber pop opus ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, spending 12 whole weeks in the charts’ top end, and either standing as a relic of classic rock or the reason why punk happened, depending on your persuasion, and a couple of undeniable pop bangers are lurking among the year’s top sellers.
ABBA’s celestial ‘Dancing Queen’s up there, and ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ saw Elton John and Kiki Dee capture Motown’s spirit with aplomb, but the undeniable pop zingers amid the dross still pang with alienating severance of the day’s leaden zeitgeist.
There’s probably no better example of 1976’s pop cultural divorce than the charts’ silver medal entry, a massive single of the day that carries little to no musical memory or legacy over 50 years later.
So which 1976 number spent 11 weeks in the top 10?
Dutch country pop doesn’t instil confidence at the best of times, but budding hitmaker Werner Theunissen took a stab after hearing Bee Gees’ ‘Massachusetts’ folk stirrings. Similarly, selecting a US state for a title, 1975’s ‘Mississippi’ would make a domestic splash with his Pussycat harmony group, the easy listening outfit centred on the three Veldpaus sister singers that saw their Americana-inspired debut top the Netherlands’ Single Top 100 charts.
But it was over in the UK that ‘Mississippi’ found its most enduring success. While shifting the most copies in South Africa, Pussycat’s mammoth single found its most enduring success in the UK, enjoying four weeks at number one, with a whopping 11 weeks staying put in the top 10 once released internationally in September 1976.
However, where does Pussycat’s rootsy homage sit in the nation’s popular recollection? ‘Mississippi’ stands as a curious footnote to 1976 pop, a commercial heavyweight in its day that’s been struck with a musical amnesia in the decades since, expunged from the mind by the punks and never seeing light even as a novelty relic. Still, Theunissen and the gang can’t have complained, selling over 7million copies worldwide and marking the first time a Dutch group had ever topped the UK charts.
