What song kept Rod Stewart’s ‘The Killing of Georgie’ from getting to number one?
There are plenty of artists in the world who might feel as though they were always hard done by in terms of chart success, never quite achieving the highs that they thought they might, but for Rod Stewart, this is far from the truth.
Having achieved a total of eight number one hits in the UK throughout his career as a solo artist, and selling 46.6 million singles and albums in the US alone, there’s little doubt that the British singer-songwriter reached beyond what ought to be expected of most artists.
Considering his relatively humble beginnings in the 1960s, working alongside the Jeff Beck Group and earning his position as the lead singer of the Faces after they parted ways with Steve Marriott and dropped the ‘Small’ from their moniker, to have gone on to these levels is a magnificent achievement.
However, that doesn’t mean that he has to be content with everything that he’s ever managed to do as a solo artist, and there will undoubtedly always be one song which he feels as though should have added a ninth UK number one to his name. Regularly referring to ‘The Killing of Georgie’ as one of his most meaningful and mature songs, he would have loved to have been able to say that this tender and heartwrenching ballad had claimed top spot in the charts, but unfortunately, it wasn’t quite able to eclipse its peak of number two in August 1976.
Competition in the UK charts around this time was tough, but what could possibly have beaten the semi-fictional tale he wrote to cope with the grief of losing a friend in a homophobic attack to the summit of the UK charts, and more importantly, was the successful hit a deserving winner?
What stopped ‘The Killing of Georgie’ from reaching number one?
Despite Stewart being at the top of his game around the mid-1970s, there was a group of pop powerhouses from Sweden who had taken complete control over the UK charts around this time, and there was little that Stewart could do to prevent them from obtaining another triumph in this instance.
ABBA’s fourth number one, ‘Dancing Queen’, was the song that hit number one while ‘The Killing of Georgie’ was languishing in second place, and remained there for a total of six weeks. This marked the third consecutive single they had released in the UK that had reached number one, with ‘Mamma Mia’ and ‘Fernando’ both having taken top spot earlier in 1976, and their first number one, ‘Waterloo’, had arrived in 1974 when they first burst into the spotlight in the UK after their Eurovision Song Contest victory.
Trying to stand in the way of a track like ‘Dancing Queen’ was never going to happen, if we’re to be realistic, and the very nature of the grasp that ABBA had over the British record-buying public meant that they were inevitably going to take top spot upon the release of their next single – it just happened to be Stewart who they beat to the top.
Unfortunately for Stewart, ‘The Killing of Georgie’ wasn’t as successful anywhere else in the world, failing to enter the top ten in any other major countries, and only peaking at number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100, despite the fact that he had already had two number ones in the States by this point.
However, his previous single, ‘Tonight’s The Night (Gonna Be Alright)’ was one of those singles that made it to number one in the US, whereas it only made it to number five in his home country. As a certain group of Swedes would later proclaim, the winner takes it all, and unfortunately, in this instance, that wasn’t Rod Stewart.
