Ballads

774. ‘Something About the Way You Look Tonight’ / ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’, by Elton John

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So here it is. The biggest-selling single of all time. Where to begin…?

Something About the Way You Look Tonight / Candle in the Wind 1997, by Elton John (his 4th of ten #1s)

5 weeks, from 14th September – 19th October 1997

I suppose we should begin in Paris, sometime after midnight on Sunday 31st August, 1997. This isn’t really the place to go into the gory details – we all know what happened. I had the dubious honour of breathlessly breaking the news to my family, after an early morning trip to a campsite newsagents. The papers all screamed of a crash, though I’m not sure if they had confirmed the death. Anyway, radios went on and the tragedy unfolded.

Fast-forward to the funeral on September 6th, where Elton John, close friend of the Princess of Wales, performed a new version of his 1973 hit ‘Candle in the Wind’ in her honour. Straight after the service he went to the studio to record it, with Sir George Martin as producer. Seven days after that it had become the fastest-selling single in history.

Interestingly, though, ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’ is listed as the second half of this double-‘A’, and so we begin with the completely incongruous ‘Something About the Way You Look Tonight’. It’s a decent enough, mid-career, soft-rock ballad. Very MOR, AOR… whatever acronym you prefer. It rises to a pretty soaring peak, with squealing guitars and Elton giving a full-throated vocal performance, before ending with a strangely flat final minute or so.

It was the 2nd single from his ‘The Big Picture’ album, and the way it piggybacked its way on to the biggest-selling single of all time is actually quite funny. It had been released by itself on the Monday, but by Saturday had been combined with ‘Candle in the Wind’. If it had been left on its own, or perhaps if Diana had fastened her seatbelt, then ‘Something About the Way…’ would probably have been headed for a #24 peak. (Elton was still capable of a decent sized hit in the mid-1990s, but they were an eclectic mix. His most recent Top 10s before this had been a duet with Pavarotti, and a duet with RuPaul.)

On to the main event then, the real reason that people flocked to buy this record. The fact that this nonsense is the best-seller of all time is proof of just how much the nation lost its collective mind in the wake of Diana’s death. At its peak ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’ was selling an estimated six copies per second, with news bulletins telling tales of people frenziedly buying fifty or more CDs each. Released on Saturday 13th, by the next day it was announced as the new number one, having sold half a million in twenty-four hours. By the end of its first full week on sale, it had comfortably passed two million.

The lyrics also lay bare the madness surrounding Diana’s death. Goodbye England’s rose, May you ever grow in our hearts… (As an aside, why not ‘Britain’s Rose? It still scans, and she was Princess of the whole island. It really gets my goat when people – often Americans – talk about ‘the King of England’. There’s no such person!) You called out to your country, And you whispered to those in pain, Now you belong to heaven, And the stars spell out your name…

So they start off bad, and get progressively worse. The lowest point probably being the line about us always carrying a torch for the nation’s golden child… My feelings on the posthumous beatification of Diana, on the Royal Family, on the British public in general, aside (stories for another day and another blog…) it’s simply a bad rewrite. The music is fine – the original ‘Candle in the Wind’, and it’s lyrics about Marilyn Munroe, is a standout in Elton’s back-catalogue – but the new words are simplistic, trite and saccharine. It makes ‘I’ll Be Missing You’, 1997’s other elegiac hit, sound like Tennyson.

And I know that Elton was her friend, and that she did lots of charity work, and that the Queen was a bit hard on her (I’ve watched ‘The Crown’!), and that all the proceeds from this record went to a good cause… But still, none of that can change the fact that it’s a truly rotten song, the worst of Elton’s ten chart-toppers (okay, joint-worst with that Ladbaby drivel).

Yet here it is, with an unassailable lead at the top of the all-time sellers list. Over five millions copies sold, with ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ lagging some million sales away, and ‘Last Christmas’ behind that. The glimmer of hope is that these festive hits will slowly catch up thanks to a month’s worth of sales and streams every December, but that won’t happen for many years, if it happens at all. For now, the biggest single ever remains a hastily-rewritten dirge for a dead princess, that nobody has actually listened to in twenty-five years, and an average soft-rock tune that came along for the ride.

773. ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’, by The Verve

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A slight change in direction then, after Will Smith’s intergalactic, family friendly, summer blockbusting number one…

The Drugs Don’t Work, by The Verve (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 7th – 14th September 1997

This is surely one of the saddest chart-toppers in history. Not many hits have made the toppermost of the poppermost with lines such as: Like a cat in a bag, Waiting to drown… This time I’m comin’ down…

I suppose we have to class this as Britpop; but it also feels bigger, more timeless than that. And if it is Britpop (bearing in mind that the Verve formed as a shoegaze band, way back in 1990) then it is another song marking the comedown, more ‘Beetlebum’ than ‘D’You Know What I Mean?’ It’s interesting, actually, that the closing years of the decade will see (slightly) more rock chart-toppers than 1995-6, the peak years of Britpop.

As with Blur’s second #1, this one’s about drugs, and the bands’ struggles with them. I mean, it’s right there in the title. But added to that is the perhaps apocryphal story that it’s about watching a close family member die of cancer. The drugs don’t work, They just make you worse, But I know I’ll see your face again… Richard Ashcroft has never confirmed this, but has mentioned in interviews that this is now the song’s widely-accepted meaning. And he seems genuinely moved by this, the fact that he’s written a song that accompanies people through some of their darkest moments.

Despite all this, and despite me just calling it “one of the saddest chart-toppers in history”, it’s not a miserable song. The reverb, and the strings, give it a light quality, and I love the bluesy rasp to Ashcroft’s voice. The highlight is the middle-eight, the gorgeously soaring Cause baby oooh, If heaven calls… ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ was the second release from their widely acclaimed ‘Urban Hymns’ album, and the strings in particular tie it back to the previous single, ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’. That record is probably the Verve’s best remembered – especially as it was their only hit in the US – but it’s not a song I’ve ever loved. For me, this record, their sole number one, is their towering achievement.

So, I wouldn’t like to overly suggest that the success of ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, which had made #2 a couple of months earlier, was the reason for this making #1. This record deserves better than ‘shadow #1’ status. Perhaps more of a factor in this being such a big hit is the fact that it was released the day after the death of Princess Diana. Lots of sources have retrospectively claimed that her death, and the public’s need for something both maudlin and uplifting, meant it went straight to number one. Maybe that’s true, but again I’d give a song of this quality a bit more benefit of the doubt. ‘Urban Hymns’ went on to become one of the decade’s biggest albums, but its success caused the band to fracture. Ashcroft embarked on a successful solo career, and the next Verve album didn’t appear until 2008.

Anyway, if the public were desperate to mark Diana’s death by purchasing a CD single, they didn’t have to wait long for an even more appropriate song to come along…

770. ‘I’ll Be Missing You’, by Puff Daddy & Faith Evans ft. 112

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And so we meet the year’s third now-problematic chart-topper. I have to admit that I’m not quite up on what Sean Combs has/hasn’t been accused of*, while I think a lawyer would advise me to mention that he’s not been found guilty of anything. It seems, though, he’s quickly heading the way of R. Kelly and Michael Jackson.

I’ll Be Missing You, by Puff Daddy (his 1st of three #1s) & Faith Evans ft. 112

3 weeks, from 22nd June – 13th July 1997 / 3 weeks from 20th July – 10th August 1997 (6 weeks total)

Back in 1997, Combs was head of his own label, Bad Boy Records. He’d signed the rapper Notorious B.I.G., and had produced for acts like Usher, TLC, Mariah Carey, even Aretha Franklin. That March, B.I.G. had been shot dead just as Combs had been preparing his own debut album. ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ is a hastily-recorded tribute to his dead pal, featuring fellow Bad Boy artists 112, and Faith Evan’s (Biggie’s widow).

So, on the one hand, it feels churlish to criticise a tribute to a recently deceased man. On the other… there’s just so much to criticise. Reviews at the time called it ‘maudlin’, and ‘turgid’, and it’s hard to disagree. The lyrics – which I once knew word-for-word – are extremely clunky. It’s kinda hard with you not around, Know you’re in heaven smiling down… Watchin’ us while we pray for you, Every day we pray for you…

It’s main hook is that it’s based around ‘Every Breath You Take’, by The Police, as well as the hymn ‘I’ll Fly Away’. In earlier posts I bemoaned not knowing the difference between a sample and an interpolation, so imagine my joy to discover that ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ features both! So blatant is it that Sting and Co., who hadn’t been asked permission, sued for 100% of the royalties (and won).

The clear highlight of this saccharine number is Evans, whose voice soars above the sentimentalism, especially in her middle-eight: Somebody tell me why… Other than that, it is catchy, and it is heartfelt. But I can’t help but see something cynical in the way it goes for the heartstrings so remorselessly. It reminds me of Wiz Khalifa’s ‘See You Again’, another rap/pop crossover about a dead man, which I think is one of the sickliest pieces of music ever recorded (sorry, spoilers, but it’s a while before we’ll come to it…)

Thing is, though, I loved this song as an eleven year old. Like I said, I knew all the words. If I’d been eleven when ‘See You Again’ came out, I’d probably have felt the same about it. But that’s the song’s problem: it lacks nuance, depth, and relies too much on simplistic lyrics about turning back the hands of time, and living life after death. If this record helps a kid process their emotions following a loved one’s death, then great. But as an adult I would need something a little more substantial.

Though maybe I’m in the minority on this, as ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ stayed at number one for six weeks in total (an impressive feat, as chart turnover was ever increasing) and would have been 1997’s biggest-seller, if it weren’t for the small matter of the most succesful record ever released coming along a few weeks later: another tribute to a dead person. It remains the 23rd highest-selling record in the UK, and the country’s biggest-ever hip-hop song. Sean Combs, AKA Puff Daddy, AKA P. Diddy, AKA Diddy (I believe he’s the only artist to have topped the charts under three different stage names) will return to this countdown eventually, though with nothing resembling the success of his first big hit.

*Long before the current accusations against him, there was a rumour that Diddy had put the hit out on the Notorious B.I.G. himself.

764. ‘I Believe I Can Fly’, by R. Kelly

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Aside from Britpop, the rapid-fire turnover of number ones, and the dominance of the Spice Girls, there’s one not so expected theme for 1997… Problematic performers.

I Believe I Can Fly, by R. Kelly (his 1st of three #1s)

3 weeks, from 6th – 27th April 1997

Starting with the disgraced, and currently incarcerated, R. Kelly. I’m not going to come over all hand-wringy about it, mind you. We managed with Gary Glitter and his gang, and when Rolf Harris sang about ‘Two Little Boys’. And unlike them, ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ doesn’t have any lyrics that sound dubious in hindsight (we’ll save that for Kelly’s next #1, ‘Ignition’).

Though some double-entendres might have given us something entertaining to write about at least, because this is a fairly dull, very worthy, song for most of its verses and bridges. It was written for the movie ‘Space Jam’, a half cartoon/half live-action film in which Michael Jordan plays basketball with Bugs Bunny (that sounds crazy when you actually type it out, but as a kid I went with it…) So there are lots of lines about never giving up, achieving miracles… If I can see it, Then I can do it… If I just believe it, There’s nothing to it…

I will say that the chorus, however, has whatever choruses need to be great. Something in the chord progressions; the simple, but not clunky, rhymes; that pause in the beat on the word ‘believe’… I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it makes for a chorus that leaves the rest of mush behind, and burrows its way into the public conscience.

By the end, things have gone full-on gospel, with some soaring strings, and Kelly bringing it home with lots of whoops, hollers and melisma. Impressive, but not worth the four minutes of sludge we had to wade through to get there. And also quite a hard turn from his usual output, which had been much more upbeat, R&B for his two prior Top 10 hits, ‘She’s Got that Vibe’ and ‘Bump and Grind’ (dubious lyrics klaxon!). Plus, if schmaltzy and over-emoted nineties ballads are your thing, I’d say R. Kelly surpassed this two years later, with ‘If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time’.

As with Glitter, I half-expected not to find Kelly on Spotify. They did, after all, make a big fuss about deleting his music in 2018, before reinstating it but refusing to feature it in any playlists. Which is a classic case of having your cake and eating it. I’m no fan of cancel culture, but if you are going to cancel someone then do it properly! Not this ‘loudly virtue signal but quietly still take the money’ nonsense. One person who did #cancelrkelly was Lady Gaga, who recorded the banging ‘Do What U Want’ with him in 2013 – long after the first allegations against him had come to light – then quickly replaced it with an (inferior) version featuring Christina Aguilera after a backlash… (I love Gaga, but I’m still sore about that one…)

Anyway, R. Kelly still has two more number ones to come, so we have plenty of time to cover his catalogue of crimes and get ourselves worked up about cancel culture if we so wish. In the meantime, let’s move on from all this, and pretend we’ve never had a problem with sex offenders having chart-topping singles, because up next it’s… Oh…

761. ‘Don’t Speak’, by No Doubt

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Without realising it, 1997 has gotten off to a pretty rocking start. Established names like Blur, and U2, have ensured that guitars have been well-represented at the top of the charts. Carrying on the trend are a band enjoying their breakthrough smash…

Don’t Speak, by No Doubt (their 1st and only #1)

3 weeks, from 16th February – 9th March 1997

…which has gone on to become one of the decade’s best-remembered hits. ‘Don’t Speak’ is both of its time – it has that US alt-rock sound, with the post-grunge power chords, that had worked for Deep Blue Something a few months earlier. But it also has some more unusual ideas in the mix: a moody flamenco beat, and melodramatic lyrics delivered more like a showtune (You and me, I can see us dying, Aren’t we…?)

Perhaps, strangest of all, there’s a woman singing! A rock song! Any excuse not to do those dishes… I jest, of course! There have been plenty of women singing rock songs at the top of the chart, and female-fronted rock bands, like Blondie, the Pretenders, T’Pau, and…. You get my point. Gwen Stefani’s fantastic vocal performance was, I’d say, one of the main selling-points.

‘Don’t Speak’ had been around for a while – as had No Doubt, who formed in Anaheim, in 1986, and went through nearly a decade of trying to make it – in a more upbeat form. Stefani re-wrote it after breaking up with the band’s bassist Tony Kanal. The pair then took the leading roles in the video, which plays on the way the media side-lined the three other members to focus on Stefani. The band were on the verge of splitting up, allegedly, on the day they filmed it.

As good as ‘Don’t Speak’ is – and I do like it, though wouldn’t include it my pantheon of all-time nineties classics – it could be seen as a bit of a sell-out for the originally ska/punk No Doubt. The lead single from their 3rd album, the breakneck ‘Just a Girl’ had been a minor hit, and then made #3 on re-release later in 1997, and I do wish that had been the bigger smash.

Maybe it’s just the fact that the peak of their career coincides almost exactly with my formative years, but it seems very odd that this is No Doubt’s, and Gwen Stefani’s, only chart-topper. At least they managed one in the UK, with ‘Don’t Speak’ never officially being released in the US, despite a sixteen-week run on top of the airplay charts. Before we go then I should mention that, in my humble opinion, No Doubt’s grimy ‘Hella Good’, Stefani’s glorious solo debut ‘What You Waiting For?’, and her equally cool, um, ‘Cool’, all should have been number ones. No Doubt, meanwhile, recently reunited for the first time in almost a decade, and played a well-received set at Coachella.

755. ‘2 Become 1’, by The Spice Girls

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After two pop bangers, introducing the world to the phenomenon that was Baby, Scary, Ginger, Posh, and Sporty, a ballad was needed.

2 Become 1, by The Spice Girls (their 3rd of nine #1s)

3 weeks, from 22nd December 1996 – 12th January 1997

It’s the first rule of nineties pop: any girl group, or boyband, worth their salt needs at least one ballad per year. Especially around Christmas time. And so The Spice Girls start their hattrick of festive chart-toppers with this slow and sultry number.

We’ve gone from friendship never ends on ‘Wannabe’, where boys came a strict second to girl power, to Tonight is the night, When two become one… here. But the ladies are still in control of all the love making. They need the love, they’re the ones who are back for more. It’s a bootie call, basically, two years before All Saints – supposedly the more streetwise girl group – had a hit by that name. The Girls even remind the fellow to rubber up: Be a little bit wiser baby, Put it on, Put it on…

A lot is made nowadays of how nobody realised what this song was about at the time– which is bollocks, frankly, because eleven-year-old me and my friends knew just what they were singing about, and accompanied the lyrics with some predictably childish hand gestures. I will say that, listening now, some of the lines are ropey, such as Any deal that we endeavour, Boys and girls feel good together… And in fact, for the single release, they changed the second half of that line to Love will bring us back together… as they were already aware of their gay fanbase, and wanted to be inclusive. It’s still a clunky line, though.

On the whole, though, it’s a fairly classy first attempt at a ballad, and was always going to be Christmas Number 1, even though they delayed its release so that the Dunblane tribute could have a week at the top. My first thought when I picture ‘2 Become 1’ is the video, with the girls wandering around a time-lapsed version of New York. There’s also the forty-five second fade-out with the violins, in which none of the girls feature, which I’ve always thought was a bold move for a pop single (though radio stations always had the option to cut it early, I suppose).

And so that was 1996. It took us a while to get through in the end, as the turnover of number ones increased. In all, there were eleven one-weekers – which I’m pretty sure is a record for one year– and eight of them came in the second half of the year. 1997 is similarly well spread out, and so we will waste no time in jumping straight into that year, next.

752. ‘I Feel You’, by Peter Andre

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After partying all night on ‘Flava’, Peter Andre aims for the flip-side of ‘90s R&B: a sickly slow-jam…

I Feel You, by Peter Andre (his 2nd of three #1s)

1 week, from 1st – 8th December 1996

I assumed that by late-1996, as we near my eleventh birthday, there wouldn’t be any number ones that I’d never heard before. But I reckoned against the fact that, as chart-topping turnover increases, there will be lots of one-week wonders to contend with. Like this.

‘I Feel You’ has some nice Boyz II Men style chord changes, a funky bassline and, if you squint your ears (you know what I mean…) you could just about mistake Andre for Michael Jackson. It also has, as most songs of this ilk do, some unintentionally stomach-turning lyrics: I’m thinking about the bedroom, baby, We’d be making love…Making love! As well as a very steamy video featuring, naturally, Andre’s six-pack as one of the main characters.

By and large, though, this song is dull. Spotify only hosts an extended five-minute mix, which is a slog when it comes to a song of this quality. And it’s sexiness is so forced, that anyone who isn’t Pepe Le Pew will be turned off. It’s custom made for horny teenagers to put on their make-out mixtapes, and they were presumably one of the song’s main customer bases in getting it to the top.

This should have been the last we hear from Peter Andre. His star shone brightly, but briefly: seven Top 10 hits between 1996 and 1998. Fate had different ideas, however. It does mean that, in seven years or so, he will reappear, and his best single will belatedly make #1… But at what cost?

Since this is looking like being a very short write-up, I’ll mention something that I’ve hinted at in earlier posts. Late-’96 is the moment that the singles chart became the chart I grew up with – not just in terms of the songs sounding like modern pop, as I’ve discussed before, but in the way they started entering at #1, and staying there for just seven days at a time. As I said above: ‘one-week wonders’, like this one, and the next song we’ll be featuring…

748. ‘Words’, by Boyzone

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We wake up, post-Chemical Brothers, with a bit of a headache. Bleary-eyed, we reach for the play button on our next #1… And it’s one hell of a comedown.

Words, by Boyzone (their 1st of six #1s)

1 week, from 13th – 20th October 1996

Not for the first time this year, a boyband reaches for the Bee Gees songbook. ‘Words’ was one of the Gibb Brothers’ first chart hits, their third record to reach the Top 10 back in 1968. The original is a very much a late-sixties ballad, drenched in strings and heavy piano chords, but it doesn’t feel overblown, with Barry Gibb’s voice right out at the front of the mix. Boyzone’s producers decide to up the drama, up the rolling drums and the layered vocal tracks, and drag a full extra minute out of the song.

It’s a bit stodgy, a bit lumpy. On their cover of ‘How Deep Is Your Love’, Take That stripped things back, and I was also a bit sniffy about it, so maybe I’m just picky. Or maybe it’s just very hard to do justice to a Bee Gees original. This take on ‘Words’ isn’t terrible (and Boyzone have some real crimes against pop to come), but that’s because the quality of the source material shines through.

One thing I do find particularly annoying about this is Ronan Keating, Boyzone’s main man, on lead vocals. He just has an annoying voice, like he’s constantly trying to add gravitas to each and every syllable rather than just singing the damn song. Alas, it’s a voice that we’ll have to get used to on top of the charts for the time being.

For all the fuss I made about Take That as the boyband of the ‘90s, for folks of my age group they were just a little too old. No, it was Boyzone that the girls in my Primary 6 class were obsessed with. To this day I remain conditioned to hate them, after getting into trouble for sending a classmate into floods of tears just because I told her how terrible they were…

But honestly, they weren’t a patch on Take That, who had some genuinely good pop songs, many of them originals. Boyzone relied too heavily on bland covers, that cynically targeted both the tweens and their mums. ‘Words’ was the group’s first number one but their sixth Top 5 hit, and they’d already had their wicked way with the Osmonds’ ‘Love Me for a Reason’, and Cat Stevens’ ‘Father and Son’.

Robson & Jerome gave us our introduction to the chart crimes of Simon Cowell, while Boyzone were managed by his henchman in the vanilla-isation of ‘90s and ‘00s pop, Louis Walsh. Not that Boyzone were the only Irish five-piece that Walsh unleashed on the world, but we’ll try not to think about them until we have to….

742. ‘Forever Love’, by Gary Barlow

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Have I ever heard this song before…? The much-anticipated solo debut from Take That’s leading man? I was about to start my final year of primary school, fairly well up on the pop hits of the day, and yet…

Forever Love, by Gary Barlow (his 1st of three solo #1s)

1 week, from 14th – 21st July 1996

There’s a chance I may never have heard ‘Forever Love’ before; but there’s also a chance I’ve heard it a hundred times and simply forgotten. It is… Dull. Bland. Pedestrian. Lacking any sort of hook, or memorable lines. Love it has, So many beautiful faces, Sharing lives, And sharing days… See what I mean. Meh.

My last two posts have been lengthy, so this one can be short and sweet. Dull love song has week at number one. Hardly the first time, and at least it was just one week. Except, ‘Forever Love’ should be so much bigger, so much more of an event. Gary Barlow was the biggest pop star in the land, striking out alone. The next George Michael, maybe?

I think he was probably trying too hard. This record is clearly well produced, something that took a lot of time and careful thought. But it’s too fussy, too needlessly ornate. The album-version intro is so long, and overwrought, that you’re bored before Gary has even opened his mouth. At the three minute mark you check how long is left, and sigh when you see there are two more to go… I’ve never written a classic pop song, but I bet nobody that’s managed it ever sat down at their piano and said ‘today is the day I write something timeless!’ You feel that Barlow probably set himself that goal, though.

The obvious comparison to make is with his former bandmate, the one who had jumped ship first and was also about to release his debut single, a cover of ‘Freedom’ by George Michael (clearly both men had the same ambition). Initially it was Gary who had the bigger hits, but it was Robbie Williams who understood better what a pop star is about, what the public wants: some catchy tunes and some showmanship. Most of them don’t care about the ‘craft’. (Also, Robbie very sensibly got someone in to help him write said tunes…)

And so Robbie will very soon eclipse his estranged bandmate. Gary has one further solo number one to come – another that, at first glance, I don’t think I’ve heard for the best part of three decades – before a decade in the wilderness beckons.

741. ‘Killing Me Softly’, by The Fugees

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I was ready to lead this post with a ‘hip-hop goes mainstream’ headline, twinning it with the success of ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ a few months before…

Killing Me Softly, by The Fugees (their 1st of two #1s)

4 weeks, from 2nd – 30th June 1996/ 1 week, from 7th – 14th July 1996 (5 weeks total)

But listening to the Fugees’ cover of ‘Killing Me Softly’ now – even though it holds the title of the UK’s ‘best-selling hip-hop single of all time (by a group)’ – there isn’t all that much hip, or hop.

The intro is a beautifully sung a cappella version of the chorus – the whole song is similarly well sung by Lauryn Hill – and even though a simple hip-hop beat comes in soon after, and Hill’s bandmates Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel throw in some adlibs, this is not a gangsta rap revolution. Your mum could have quite happily heard this on the car radio without reaching for the dial in horror.

Which is presumably why this song went on to be the highest seller of 1996, to this day remaining in the all-time Top 50. It is also a cover of a much loved classic, Roberta Flack’s version having made #6 (and #1 on the Billboard chart) in 1973. Flack’s wasn’t the original though (something I just found out today) as Lori Liebermann had recorded a version the year before, with her two song-writing partners Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel. There have been lawsuits and recriminations over which of them dreamed up the song’s concept, and the lyrics, but it’s generally agreed that the subject of the song – the man killing the singer softly with his words – is Don McLean.

A record as great as this will have moments in particular that stand out, and I love the twangy sitars that chop up the verses, and the way Hill pronounces ‘boy’ as ‘bwoi’. But the beauty here is mainly in the song’s simplicity, in the way that they allow the raw and very personal lyrics to stand out, much as they do in the earlier versions. The way that the woman listening to the unnamed singer has an almost sexual reaction to hearing his music: I prayed that he would finish, But he just kept right on…

This may be hip-hop lite, but at the same time it is undeniable that this was the moment when the genre was going mainstream in Britain. More and more rap #1s are coming up, including one much less radio-friendly one from the Fugees themselves. Perhaps that’s the way it had to be – hip-hop in through the back door, covering easy-listening classics, persuading suburban mums to buy the album… I can imagine many shocked faces in the summer of 1996 when people realised that this pop classic was a bit of an outlier in the Fugees’ canon.

The Fugees were a trio from New Jersey (Jean and Michel were of Haitian origin) who had been together since 1990, and recording since 1993. Their first album hadn’t much troubled the charts, and so this record was their breakthrough smash. Interestingly, the strange Billboard rules of the time meant that neither this nor any of their subsequent hits actually charted in the US, as they were only released to airplay. In any case, it still made #1 in twenty-one countries around the world.

I won’t delve into the Fugees’ subsequent careers, and varying levels of fame and infamy, just yet, as they have that aforementioned second #1 to come very soon. But I will linger here a moment more, as this really is one of the great ‘90s chart-toppers. The fact that I cannot listen to either of the earlier versions without wanting to add the ad-libs from this one is testament to that. ‘Killing Me Softly’ did a dance with ‘Three Lions’ at #1, meaning that it is one of only two singles to knock the same song off top spot twice. Not ‘one time’, but ‘two times’… See what I did there?