The Summer of Love: What song held the number one spot for the longest in 1967?
Oh, to be in the groovy year of 1967. It was a year of wild extremes. It saw the so-called Summer of Love coincide with the startling deployment of over half a million US troops to Vietnam. It saw the race for space dramatically intensify, somehow, at the exact same time that Britain decriminalised homosexuality. We were hurtling towards the future, but still very much chained to the past.
These stark contrasts were everywhere in the music charts, too. Ostensibly, in August 1966, The Beatles had changed culture with Revolver. The deeply druggy and psychedelic headwind of the record washed over the arts. Pushing the era further towards experimentalism and a sense of ‘the strange’.
So, by the time ‘67 arrived with the likes of Sgt Pepper, Axis: Bold as Love, Forever Changes, The Doors, The Velvet Underground & Nico, and Surrealistic Pillow, all of which were released that fateful year, heady weirdness also had an aura of familiarity. The times were strange, and the masses were getting on board with the music that matched.
However, that only tells half of the story. Not everyone was quite so quick to adapt. Nothing proves that polarity quite like the fact that in the UK, ‘Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields’, perhaps one of the greatest double-singles of all time, was kept off the top spot by Engelbert Humperdinck’s dower ballad ‘Release Me’.
The only thing strange, experimental and weird about Engelbert Humperdinck and his weepy hymn is that Engelbert Humperdinck isn’t actually his real name. Alas, the baffling choices stopped with his stage name, and he firmly had his finger on the pulse of popular familiarity when it came to his crooned chart-topper.
‘Release Me’ remained in the number one spot for a whopping six weeks. At the close of the decade, it would be one of the best-selling British singles of all time. But it wasn’t just on this side of the pond where this odd dichotomy of the hip and the square both being profitable at once.
What song held the number-one spot for the longest in 1967?
Humperdinck’s track wasn’t quite as successful in the States, but they did have another novelty hit rule the airways in ‘67. ‘To Sir With Love’ by Lulu claimed the crown on the far side of the pond, topping the Billboard chart for an impressive five weeks. Granted, the model certainly had youth culture appeal, but the track wasn’t anywhere near as cutting-edge as ‘People Are Strange’ or ‘White Rabbit’, which were competing against it.
That difference pretty much perfectly highlights why it was so successful. In a time of rapid change, the familiarity of these tracks brought comfort to the conservative masses, and that proved very commercially lucrative. The melodrama and sentimentalism still moved people enough for them to part with their cash for a casual evening waltz around a kitchen steadily filling up with white goods.
The Summer of Love, on the other hand, was niche and it was a collective movement more so than anything that was spearheaded by a single track. But you could argue that it proved far more timeless and meaningful than its high-selling competition.
