The highest-selling instrumental single of all time
Instrumental songs don’t exactly go hand in hand with pop chart stardom. Being a major music celebrity is at least partially predicated on identity; by contrast, instrumental songs often highlight anonymity. If your voice isn’t on a track, it’s easy for audiences to simply have no idea who they’re listening to. Reaching number one is a major feat for any artist, but they tend to be reflective of an artist’s popularity rather than a song’s popularity.
Of course, the charts do have a history of instrumental tracks hitting it big. Technically, the Billboard Hot 100 considers ‘Harlem Shake’ by Baauer to be an instrumental, even though it has a prominent vocal hook. Before that, you have to rewind all the way back to 1985 to find the other most-recent instrumental number one – Jan Hammer’s ‘Miami Vice Theme’.
The Billboard Hot 100 has notched 25 instrumental number one singles across its eight decades. Some of them have continued to stay in the public consciousness, like Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band’s ‘A Fifth of Beethoven’ or Vangelis’ theme for Chariots of Fire. Others haven’t: the one artist to notch two instrumental number one singles, Dave “Baby” Cortez, hasn’t seen either of his number one songs, ‘The Happy Organ’ and ‘Rinky Dink’, be referenced very much since their tenures at the top of the charts.
But there was one genre that was perfectly suited for instrumental hits: disco. With its big focus centred on dancefloor-ready rhythms and bass-heavy hook lines, disco didn’t need very much in the way of vocals in order to produce big hits. Silver Connection’s number one hit ‘Fly, Robin, Fly’ has just six words repeated throughout its runtime. The theme from the 1970s TV show S.W.A.T. didn’t need any words to hit number one in 1976.
When it came to the most successful instrumental in the history of the Hot 100, though, that would be a combination of disco and theme music. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the writer of the biggest-selling instrumental of all time was none other than legendary composer John Williams, whose film scores have created some of the most iconic movie music of all time. But Williams didn’t get credit for going to number one: instead, a reinterpretation of some of his Star Wars themes, paired with disco beats, went to number one under the arrangement of American session musician Domenico Monardo under the stage name Meco’.
Meco’s mashup ‘Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band’ spent two weeks at number one in the fall of 1977. This was when Star Wars mania had reached its peak, so much so that Williams’ original theme was sitting at number ten when Meco’s mashup was at number one. People seriously could not get enough of the Star Wars theme, and according to the Guinness Book of World Records, Meco reached the summit of instrumental recordings by selling over two million copies of ‘Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band’.
Check out the ‘Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band’ down below.
