What song held the number one spot for the longest in 1977?
1977: A year of punk revolution, monarchical celebration, and Cold War conflicts springing up across the globe.
Within the world of pop music, though, the industry was busy fighting against a younger generation of pop revolutionaries, who were attempting to seize the means of musical production.
Earth circa 1977 was a planet divided politically, culturally, and economically. The Cold War continued to dominate the collective consciousness of humanity, even while a multitude of smaller yet similarly deadly conflicts plagued vast areas of Africa, South Asia, and South America. In the perpetually grey surroundings of Britain, the majority of ordinary people were still struggling to recover from the previous year’s ‘winter of discontent’ and seemingly unending industrial action, all the while celebrating Queen Elizabeth II for reaching 25 years on the throne.
Still, if you were exploring the history of the year based solely on the pop charts, you wouldn’t get much of an indication about that rather depressing state of affairs. In many cases, the songs rising and falling through the music charts can be an invaluable resource in gauging the tastes, feelings, and atmospheres of a certain time, but even Britain’s music fans were divided in 1977.
There were those who were still attempting to cling to the degrading prog rock scene, those happy to follow whatever the latest soft-pop sound was, but there was also a growing movement of music fans looking to tear down the establishment and rebuild from the rubble to usher in the age of punk rock.
Despite this, punk records didn’t often make it into the mainstream pop charts, owing both to the fact that the punk scene was always relatively niche, mostly published on small independent labels, and the fact that the musical establishment did everything in its power to suppress the popularity of the movement. 1977 saw one of the British charts’ biggest controversies when the Sex Pistols’ anti-jubilee anthem ‘God Save the Queen’ was kept off the top spot by Rod Stewart of all people.
If it wasn’t punk dominating the charts back in 1977, what was? Well, the usual suspects are all present: Abba had two colossal number-ones in the form of ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, and ‘The Name of the Game’, while the likes of Rod Stewart, Leo Sayer, and Kenny Rogers all scored number-ones, too. Perhaps one of the year’s most notable number-ones was Elvis Presley’s ‘Way Down’, topping the charts for five weeks in the wake of ‘The King’s death in August.
Presley’s hit might have marked one of the most important moments in the musical history of the year, but it wasn’t the year’s longest-running hit. In late November, Wings occupied the top spot with their ode to the Scottish coast, ‘Mull of Kintyre’, which claimed gold on the singles chart for a whopping nine weeks. For reference, the longest-running number-one for The Beatles was ‘From Me To You’, which lasted seven weeks in 1963.
However, for McCartney’s single, the accolades don’t stop there as it also became the year’s coveted Christmas number-one, keeping the Brighouse And Rastrick Brass Band at runners-up, much to the dismay of the entire county of Yorkshire. Even more impressively, the single was reportedly the first to sell two million copies worldwide.
So, what song held the US number one spot for the longest?
Despite the global success of Wings’ Scotland-soaked single, the track was not the longest-running hit in the United States, failing even to break into the Billboard Hot 100. Instead, that spot was filled by Debby Boone, whose cover of ‘You Light Up My Life’ spent ten weeks at the top spot.
Ironically, Boone’s unprecedented time at the top of the charts broke a longstanding record held by none other than The Beatles, whose McCartney-penned masterpiece ‘Hey Jude’ was number-one for nine weeks in the US.
To this day, it is still unclear what Macca did to the US music-buying public in 1977 to have his record broken and his Wings single clipped.
