What is the shortest song to hit number one?
Ever since the dawn of pop music, the standard song length of two to three minutes has been almost universally accepted, but even when that runtime extended tenfold during the age of expansive jazz suites, mind-bending psychedelia, or the colossal narratives of prog, there haven’t been many artists who dared to cut their song lengths down even further.
That two or three-minute runtime wasn’t merely plucked from the ether at random; it goes back to the days when radio ruled the airwaves, and deejays were keen to move the show along as quickly as possible – so no 20-minute psychedelic solos or extensive spoken word sections would make it past the radio censors. What’s more, song length during the early days of pop was often dictated by the domination of physical media. There is, after all, only so many grooves you can squeeze onto one seven-inch vinyl record.
If an artist were to extend that song-length, the LP was the only real format in which it would fit, given that squeezing too much music onto a single record reduces the sound quality drastically. The only problem with the LP format, of course, is that it doesn’t show up in the singles chart. Equally, though, asking audiences to buy an entire single only for it to last for a minute or so is a pretty tall order, particularly for your more frugal record buyers.
Hence, if you look back at all the number-one singles in UK history, the vast majority have fit neatly within that accepted two to three-minute bracket. There have, however, been some exceptions. Back in 1998, for instance, Oasis added another accolade to their ever-expanding trophy cabinet when they made ‘All Around The World’ the longest number-one in UK chart history, clocking in at nearly ten minutes.
But what about the shortest?
On the other end of the spectrum, though, there haven’t been many number-one singles that are overly short. While there is a range of sub-one-minute songs out there, spanning the spectrum from Descendants’ punk ode to mastication, ‘I Like Food’ at 15 seconds, to The Stone Roses’ call for the overthrow of the monarch on their 55-second track, ‘Elizabeth My Dear’. Neither of those songs, it might not surprise you to know, failed to chart, however.
You invariably have to reach above the one-minute mark to reach number one, it would appear. A few notable members of the ‘one-and-a-bit-minute number-one club’ include The Beatles, whose third single, ‘From Me To You’, boasts a runtime of just one minute and 56 seconds, and Elvis Presley’s ‘Teddy Bear’, which topped the US singles chart in 1957 with a one-minute and 46-second runtime.
Back in Blighty, though, the record holder for the shortest number-one is the pop star turned Daily Mail journalist, Adam Faith. Among his multitude of hit records back in his 1950s heyday, one of his two number-one entries was the John Barry-arranged ‘What Do You Want?’, which spent three weeks at number-one in 1959, despite only being one minute and 38 seconds in length.
Even Faith’s record, however, is bested if you take the American singles chart into consideration. On that side of the pond, the shortest number-one goes to the doo-wop classic ‘Stay’ by the Nashville outfit Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, at one minute and 37 seconds – stripping Faith of his record by a mere second.
In the modern day, when all forms of art are being increasingly reduced to short-form ‘content’, the fact that the two shortest number-one singles of all time both came from the turn of the 1960s seems rather odd. Perhaps in the coming few months or years, the singles charts will be increasingly cut down to the ten-second song snippets that social media seems to favour so much, and both Maurice Williams and Adam Faith’s records will finally be beaten.
