What song held the number one spot for the longest in 1974?
Was the 1970s truly the best decade for music? I find it incredibly hard to argue otherwise.
While the 1960s gave way to so much of what we love, the 1980s help thrust us further into the future, and the 1990s allowed us to enjoy the true swansong of mainstream credibility, the 1970s showcased all of those things.
The Beatles had abdicated the throne, and rather than one willing suitor stepping up in hopes of seizing it, the collective music community took on their mantra of communal love and ran with it. They shared the spoils of hungry music listeners in that decade, but not just in the safe space of one genre. What was just popular music in the early 1960s had trickled down into prog-rock, psych-rock and punk rock.
That wasn’t all, either. Motown gave way to the commercial success of soul, allowing the burgeoning voices of its genre to flourish and help develop its soundscape. While disco and funk also found their place in this new healthy landscape of music consumption, no one genre ruled the roost, and music was all the better for it.
When the decade turned, the music world wasted no time either in hauling ass. While former Beatle George Harrison arguably best initiated the first year of the decade with All Things Must Pass, Simon and Garfunkel also released Bridge Over Troubled Water, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young delivered Déjà Vu.
In the years that followed, music only seemed to get better with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On making up the best of 1971, while David Bowie’s groundbreaking artistic persona gifted us The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spider from Mars in 1972 and hit a storm, Pink Floyd one-upped in 1973 with The Dark Side of the Moon.
Simply reeling those iconic albums off one by one is tiring work and delivers more than enough greatness for one music fan to digest. But such was the consistency in the 1970s that, come 1974, fans expected it like the newspaper every morning. They wanted to see the next groundbreaking record to simply turn music on its head.
Neil Young came back with On the Beach, Joni Mitchell with Court and Spark and Funkadelic with Standing on the Verge of Getting It On. But none of these albums hosted a song that eventually took the top spot.
So, what was the longest-running number one from 1974?
Stateside, the top spot was reserved for someone operating in true star status. Barbara Streisand was not only starring in every box-office hit, she was also topping charts with her musical ability that helped her record soundtracks for whatever big screen number she was filming. She is what many would consider the original cross-platform star, and in 1974, she capitalised on it perfectly, as her song ‘The Way We Were’ for the film of the same name was the number-one song of the entire year.
In the UK, however, Mud claimed the top spot with their single ‘Tiger Feet’, spending a total of four weeks at number one.
