What was the ‘song of the summer’ in 1966?
In 1966, truly anything could happen – the USSR’s Luna 10 became the first spacecraft to orbit the Moon, The Beatles decided to stop touring, and England’s football team actually won a World Cup.
All bets were off at this point, as dreams came true just as quickly as they were crushed, sports stars became historic heroes, and the limits of universal exploration had been completely stripped away.
That hopefulness was at the very heart of the counterculture movement, which was in full swing by 1966. And while the optimism of intergalactic exploration and a World Cup win added to that, ultimately, The Beatles’ decision to withdraw from the road and focus solely on their studio work was more pivotal.
The moment The Beatles decided to close themselves off from the world, they simultaneously opened it up and sparked a renaissance of experimental music that would result in the early stages of Pink Floyd, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix. But music fans would have to wait until the remaining years of the decade to be treated to those up-and-comers, while The Beatles remained dominant in the gateway year of 1966.
In that year, The Beatles released what many regard as their greatest album of all time, Revolver. It was an album that perfectly straddled the pop sound of their early decade domination, while giving a subtle glimpse into the psychedelic future, and so it naturally became the soundtrack of this changing year. A year when history, sport and culture waved goodbye to the horrors of old and looked forward to the intergalactic promise of what is to come.
Upon the album’s release on August 5th, it shot straight to number one in the UK album charts, where it stayed for seven weeks, soundtracking the jubilant summer of this bizarre yet exciting year. And while ‘Taxman’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ represented obvious singles for the band – for varying reasons – it was the childlike ‘Yellow Submarine’ that stormed the singles chart and became the song of the British summer in 1966.
Did ‘Yellow Submarine’ soundtrack the summer of 1966 in the US?
Despite their outrageously large fanbase in America that ultimately built the foundations of Beatlemania, ‘Yellow Submarine’ didn’t quite stick in the same way over there, as it did on domestic soil.
Instead, the American audiences gravitated towards ‘Paperback Writer’, which ended up hitting the number one spot on the US singles chart for a week in June.
By the time their album was released in August, the American audience had already decided that ‘Summer in the City’ by The Lovin’ Spoonful was their summer soundtrack, keeping it at the top of the singles charts for three weeks that month.
It was a simple track about the sweaty life of an American summer in the city, which gives way to a myriad of opportunities in the late-night haze, and so provided the perfect soundtrack for a generation of youngsters bathing in the freedom of mid-1960s nightlife.
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