What is the longest UK single ever?
At the birth of rock and roll in the mid-1950s, the holy 45″ single burned with ephemeral potency. Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry all dropped smash hits that wavered around the two-minute mark. Later in the British invasion’s infancy, The Beatles would drop a dizzying level of Merseybeat stonkers that also raced along a pop careen rarely surpassing two minutes and 30 seconds in length.
The first Fab Four single to reach the mammoth four-minute milestone was 1967’s ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, their studio debut free from the shackles of Beatlemania’s punishing touring schedule and fan hysteria.
This was the cusp of the album era, when the LP format was realised as pop and rock’s primary artistic statement and a scope with which to view all your conceptual ambitions, thus, cue the psychedelic carnival ride of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Who’s Tommy rock opera.
Naturally, the single for a while became a secondary concern, the era’s prog wizards fully immersed in how deep their narrative arcs could go, and many a rock LP at the time dropped without any single supporting it.
Just as glam was about to blast some pop glitter onto the charts, arena monsters Grand Funk Railroad unleashed 1969’s ‘Inside Looking Out’, a record for the time with a 7” A-side clocking at nine minutes and 31 seconds, and standing as their only UK Top 40 hit. Jump to January 1998, and Oasis scored their fourth number one with Be Here Now’s third single ‘All Around the World’, the longest British song to top the charts, stretching to nine minutes and 38 seconds, and curiously, 18 seconds longer than the album version.
Responding to the explosion in dance music, the Official Charts Company relaxed the rules on singles duration in 1991, permitting releases featuring different mixes of the same song to run up to 40 minutes. Eyeing up this rule revision with creative possibility, one London electronic duo sought to exploit a potential loophole to break British chart records.
So, what is the longest ever UK single?
With the rise of the maxi-single, the industry rule allowing 40 minutes worth of remixes to one title to warrant entry into the UK Singles Chart was artfully deployed by ambient house pioneers, The Orb, in June 1992.
Doing away with accompanying tracks and remixes, they decided to issue a special 39 minutes and 58 seconds mix of UF Orb’s ‘Blue Room’, the primary CD release’s sole track. A bubbly and hypnotic cut that swirls in a psychedelic and druggy realm of trance-like flutter and remote samples, ‘Blue Room’ aptly illustrates its inspiration with alien energy, a reference to the USA’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and its supposed secret ‘blue room’ stockpiling confidential UFO evidence.
Despite its challenging length, ‘Blue Room’ would sail to number eight on the UK charts and endure as one of The Orb’s defining moments. A memorable performance on BBC’s Top of the Pops helped propel their mammoth single into the consciousness, with Alex Paterson and former member Kris Weston playing a strange board game donned in white, hazmat suits and passing a globus cruciger Christian relic to one another.
Audacious yet full of good humour, The Orb’s ‘Blue Room’ spins with cosmic energy as a testament to dance music’s grasp of untapped creativity and far-flung ambitions that still feels gleefully heady over 30 years later.
