This number one marks the beginning, and the end, of two eras. It is the last chart-topper from ‘the Golden Era of Boybands’ (1989-2002). It is also the start of a strange late-career run for Elton John, in which he will be remixed, duet with dead rappers, and commit atrocities in the name of charity…
Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word, by Blue (their 3rd and final #1) ft. Elton John (his 5th of ten #1s)
1 week, 15th – 22nd December 2002
Compared to some of those records to come, I like this take on Elton’s 1976 #11 hit. It’s true enough to the original, with Elton’s piano coming through loud and clear, and keeps the Parisian sidewalk feel of the solo (swapping the accordion for a harmonica), with enough modern dressing for it to fit in and be a 21st century success. Starting songs with a vinyl crackle was apparently very hot in late 2002.
I will say that the addition of a modern R&B drumbeat, and a slightly faster tempo, means that this version is far less desolate than the original, and therefore loses some of its emotional heft. And I will also say that it is interesting to contrast the polished, technically very good, boyband voices of Blue with Elton’s gruff authenticity, and to wonder how far Reg Dwight might have got had he auditioned in front of Simon Cowell and the other ‘Pop Idol’ judges…
So, I like this, and liked it at the time, but I’m not sure deep down if it’s really much good. Is it just working with good source material? Is it given credibility thanks to Elton performing on it? I suppose it’s not much different to him and George Michael doing ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ a decade earlier.
Like I said, this is it for boybands at the top of the charts, for a while anyway. Busted and McFly will dominate the next few years, but for my money they were boys in a band rather than ‘boybands’. It’s an important distinction! Therefore this is the end of a lineage that started with NKOTB thirteen years earlier, past Take That’s slow climb to credibility, Boyzone’s dullness, 5ive’s fun, Westlife’s relentlessness… I make it twelve boybands in total, with around forty chart-toppers, totals that could increase depending on how we class Boyz II Men, Hanson, and Blazin’ Squad. Disparage them if you will, but they were pretty much the sound of the charts for an entire generation.
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.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a live number one. And here’s one featuring two of Britain’s best-loved pop stars…
Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me, by George Michael (his 4th of seven #1s) & Elton John (his 3rd of ten #1s)
2 weeks, from 1st December – 15th December 1991
It starts off as George Michael doing a cover of a 1974 Elton John hit. It’s nice enough – Michael is an excellent singer, especially considering that it’s a live recording – but I’m not sure if live recordings are ever better than studio versions. They’re great at capturing the essence of an artist, and sound fine as long as you’re a singer as competent as George Michael. But unless you were there, in the crowd at Wembley Arena in March 1991, is this as enjoyable as it would have been in the studio?
What happens at the end of the first chorus, though, elevates it above most other live singles. The crowd noise rises… something’s happening… and George utters the immortal line: Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Elton John! The crowd’s reaction suggests it was a surprise, arranged for the closing night of Michael’s tour. From then on, this record becomes a moment in pop history. They had already performed the song together at Live Aid in 1985, while at Elton’s recent Glastonbury headline show he touchingly dedicated the song to his late partner in this duet.
What I will say in its favour is that, despite being almost six minutes in length, this cover doesn’t drag. The slow build of the intro and first verse, the revelation, and then the duet are all propelled along by the crowd’s reaction. There’s real drama there. Were this a studio recording then it may well have dragged (which the original does, a bit, despite it eventually reaching a pretty rousing climax, and despite having two out of the five Beach Boys on backing vocals…)
Like the artist they knocked from top spot, Michael Jackson, the 1990s would be among Elton and George’s ‘best’ periods for #1s, despite them being synonymous with earlier decades. It’s only Elton’s second chart-topper of the decade, and that’s already better than his ‘70s and ‘80s returns combined. Meanwhile, apart from his duet with Aretha Franklin, none of Michael’s ‘Faith’ era smashes made number one in the UK.
Aside from the fact that it featured two of the nation’s biggest pop stars, another reason for this record’s instant success (it entered at the top) was that all money raised went to AIDS charities. And our very next chart-topper might explain why, sadly, the disease was at the forefront of the public’s consciousness in late 1991.
It’s amazing to think that Elton John went the entirety of the eighties without a number one single. It’s amazing to think that, twenty years into a stellar career, this was his first solo UK chart-topper. But perhaps most surprisingly, it’s amazing that this particular record was a hit at all.
Sacrifice / Healing Hands, by Elton John (his 2nd of ten #1s)
5 weeks, from 17th June – 22nd July 1990
It’s a decent enough song. Elton and Bernie could still knock out a good tune, even this far into their partnership. But it’s very middle-of-the-road, very made-for-Radio-2, very much Elton John reinventing himself for middle age (he was approaching forty-five when it eventually made #1).
And, given that this is adult-oriented soft rock, the lyrics are on a fittingly grown-up theme. Into the boundary, Of each married man, Sweet deceit comes calling, And negativity lands… Ergo, men are men, and they all cheat. I’m pretty sure he blames the frigid woman: Cold, cold heart, Hard done by you… Bernie Taupin was coming to the end of his second marriage at the time of writing, and you do wonder if that might have been an influence.
Away from the lyrics, this has all the glossy touches you’d expect of a soft rock ballad in 1990. I don’t dislike it – in many ways it’s a sophisticated piece of song writing befitting of the nation’s (second?) most prolific hit making partnership – but it also gives me the feeling of mineral water poured over ice: crisp, and clear, and pretty cold. Yet it’s lingered on in the Elton John canon, seemingly held in higher regard than I afford it, and the Cold, cold heart line formed the basis of a 2021 #1, thirty-one years on…
The flip side of this double-‘A’, ‘Healing Hands’, is a bit more lively. It’s a bouncy rocker: a little bluesy, a little gospel. It was apparently inspired by the Four Top’s ‘Reach Out, I’ll Be There’, and you can hear it in the chorus: Reach out, For her healing hands… Is it just me, or is he suggesting that God is a woman…? Anyway, it’s a great vocal performance from John and, while he gets plenty of praise for his showmanship and his presence, I’m not sure he always gets enough credit for his voice.
Again, though, it’s very mum-friendly. Why now? Why, on the verge of being a very old man (in pop star terms) did Elton score the biggest British hit of his career? We have time to ponder this as ‘Healing Hands’ meanders towards its conclusion (seriously, it has one of the longest fade-outs ever). ‘Sacrifice’ had been released nine months before, making a lowly #55. Steve Wright then started playing it on Radio 1 (crushing my Radio 2 theory from four paragraphs ago), it was re-released with ‘Healing Hands’, and the rest was history. Proceeds from the record’s sales went to four different AIDS charities, which again probably help boost sales.
We can perhaps see this record as a dividing point in Elton John’s career. Long gone were the hit-filled, rhinestoned, giant spectacled days of the seventies. The eighties had brought addiction, rehab, a doomed marriage, fewer hits… By 1990, he’d had one Top 10 single in five years. If this hadn’t caught fire, would Elton have faded into obscurity and the nostalgia circuits? Maybe that’s a stretch, but it definitely set him up for a huge career renaissance in the 1990s. Superstar duets, Disney themes, and the planet’s biggest-selling single of all time, were all about to follow…
And so, Sir Elton John belatedly takes the stage. Much like Bowie, who finally made #1 a few months before, we’ve already missed a lot of his best stuff. But hey – better late than never. Plus, this is still a pop classic.
Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, by Elton John (his 1st of eight #1s) & Kiki Dee (her 1st and only #1)
6 weeks, from 18th July – 29th August 1976
Don’t go breaking my heart… I couldn’t if I tried… It’s a proper duet, with the singers taking different lines. Finishing one another’s lines, in fact, like an irritatingly cute couple. Oh honey if I get restless… Baby you’re not that kind… It’s the first duet to top the charts since, um, Windsor Davies and Don Estelle. Or, if you’re looking for a non-novelty duet, you’ll have to go back to Serge and Jane, or Esther and Abi Ofarim… Ahem. The point being – genuine duets like this don’t come along too often.
I’m surprised, to be honest, just how disco this record is. It’s usually background noise, a seventies ‘Best Of’ staple, and I’d have put it down as pure pop with a nod towards classic Motown. But listening properly, you can hear that the guitars, the drums and the strings are all set to ‘Disco’. Plus, it’s got the perfect rhythm for hand-jiving.
Woohooo… Nobody knows it…. That hook cements ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’s place as a gem. Is it as good as, say, ‘Rocket Man’? No, obviously not. Unlike David Bowie, Elton isn’t breaking his chart-topping duck with an all-time classic. (In fact, like Bowie, and Queen, who we’ve also met recently, Elton John is very poorly served by his #1 singles.) Still, it’s a fun record, and a karaoke classic, despite being much longer than it has any need to be, at four and a half minutes.
As for Elton’s partner in this… Who was Kiki Dee? Turns out she was the first British female to sign for Tamla Motown, which is pretty impressive. She had scored a few minor chart placings before this mega-hit, then she scored a few more minor ones in the years that followed, until she re-teamed with Elton in 1993, for #2 hit ‘True Love’. She’s still around, releasing albums and working in musical theatre. (Apparently her part in ‘Don’t Go Breaking…’ was written with Dusty Springfield in mind, but she was too sick to record it. No offence to Kiki, who sings it very well, but just imagine how darned iconic this would have been as Elton & Dusty…)
Then there’s the artist formerly known as Reg… Wonder what became of him? Well, amazingly, we won’t meet him again atop this countdown until 1990, when he will finally get a solo chart-topper! It’s not that he lacked hits – this record was his 10th Top 10 hit since breaking through with ‘Your Song’, and he would continue to have hits throughout the eighties – just that for whatever reason they rarely made it all the way to the top.
Till then, then, Elton. Before we go, though, it’s worth pausing to remembering that, as the follow-up to ‘True Love’, ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ returned to the charts, at #7, in a very ‘90s house version. Elton’s duetting partner on that occasion: RuPaul Charles.
The UK Number Ones Blog 