1967: the week Engelbert Humperdinck stopped The Beatles reaching number one
The ongoing debate around commercial success and chart positions challenges whether they actually reflect lasting, cultural impact, or whether they’re merely fickle metrics that say very little about an artist’s talent or resonance. The Beatles, on the other hand, were the exception.
Typically, it takes a band a little more than an immediate hit single to establish widespread success, and although The Beatles continued to soar past their debut track, ‘Love Me Do’, it certainly set a new standard for mainstream success and chart numbers in general.
What was especially charming about the Fab Four, however, was that this wasn’t the sole driving force behind their desire to make it in the music industry. From day one, those Liverpudlian legends set out only to make good music, without much care for whether they’d soar to the top of the charts, let alone become the biggest name in the entire business.
And even when that’s precisely what they became, they continued to revolutionise, taking risks with genres and styles that most hadn’t ever heard before, much less witnessed dominate the charts. After all, when The Beatles came along, people were used to hearing the same old formulaic hits appear time and time again, until suddenly, the airwaves were filled with something more complex and original, a move which changed the game forever.
Unlike many of their peers, who also worked hard to break the mould and lead the industry forward, The Beatles’ hard work also translated into monumental commercial success, a trend they established from their third-ever single, ‘From Me To You’, which spent seven weeks at number one, becoming their longest-running single ever.
While it struggled to make an impact overseas, the band would soon witness their popularity in America skyrocket with other hits, earning a total of 20 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 across their career, surpassing the 18 they achieved on home soil. It seemed, then, that no one could outdo the kings themselves, not when it came to taking that coveted hot spot.
That said, a few rivals did actually manage to do it. Although typically a rare occurrence, the biggest one occurred in the UK, when Engelbert Humperdinck blocked the band’s 1967 single ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ from reaching number one with ‘Release Me’, marking their first to fail to reach the top spot since 1963’s ‘Please Please Me’.
With rumours brewing about the band’s forthcoming split, some took the song’s failure to reach number one as a sign that their popularity in the UK was waning, which was absurd, considering their broader impact and legacy. However, at the time, Paul McCartney also acknowledged that this likely had more to do with the fact that Humperdinck’s track was a “completely different type of thing”, and that what they were doing was different to other hits they’d had before, less mainstream, perhaps.
Addressing his own success, Humperdinck once told Goldmine that the band weren’t “too upset” because they already “had several number ones”. He also recalled meeting McCartney and the many times that Ringo Starr attended his live shows, while crediting his success in large part to that song.
“The single went to number one in many countries throughout the world, and I can go around the world because of that song,” he said.
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