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 4^th of ten #1s)

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

I suppose we should begin in Paris, sometime after midnight on Sunday 31^st 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 6^th, 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 2^nd 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 13^th, 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.