Greatest chart number twos | Music | The Guardian
Share on Messenger
Close
'Nobody remembers who came second," as the saying goes. Whether that's ever strictly true - and it would take a brave man to say it to Buzz Aldrin's face - is debatable, but in pop at least one man knows exactly who came second. As producer of Radio 2's Twos on 2 show, Phil Swern commemorates the Top 40's greatest near misses.
Swern conceived the idea while assembling a book of pub trivia two years ago. Twos on 2 proved so popular that it has now spawned a tie-in album. "I felt sad for some of the records that didn't come off," says Swern. "There are lots of programmes and features that talk about number ones. These records were so close and if it weren't for just one other record, they would have made it."
Twos on 2 is the latest product of Britain's enduring obsession with the top 40 singles chart. Chart aficionados pore over Guinness's British Hit Singles book like Jewish scholars over the Talmud. Magazines may persist in running features called The 50 Bass Solos You Must Hear Before You Expire!, but they are transient, and forgotten almost as soon as they are printed. Chart placings, however, are immutable.
There is something impregnable about a number one. However lousy it may be, it has earned its niche in chart history. But the story told by 52 years of number ones is patchy and erratic. It's one in which Nick Berry makes more impact than the Smiths, and the Wurzels are more significant than the Clash. Number twos (and let's get the giggling out of the way now or we'll never make it to the end of the feature) constitute a secret history of the charts, one less distorted by charity records, TV tie-ins and novelty hits.
"I was interested in the idea of great records that were held off number one by, shall we say, 'grate' records," says Swern. He recalls the debacle of 1981: "The most famous one is Vienna by Ultravox, which was held off by Shaddap You Face by Joe Dolce."
Ultravox's epic synth grumble rightly appears on the Twos on 2 CD, but not all the inclusions are quite so worthy - it's hard to imagine anyone balling their fists at the twist of fate that kept Ronan Keating's Lovin' Each Day from the top spot. The most potent number twos are those that carry a sense of injustice. In 2002, on the 50th anniversary of the charts, Music Choice TV held a poll that functioned as a court of appeal for thwarted chart-toppers. The Beatles' Let It Be came first; it was blocked in 1970 by Lee Marvin's Wanderin' Star. Next came Elvis's Suspicious Minds, which proved less popular than Rolf Harris's Two Little Boys (1969). Some of the foiled bands, most famously the Who, never got higher than number two in their entire careers.
During the 1990s, the chief spoilsports were Robson Green and Jerome Flynn. In 1995, with two consecutive singles, the recently demobbed Soldier Soldier stars kept down first Pulp's Common People and then Oasis's Wonderwall. They could have been no more efficient had they been hired for the job as anti-Britpop counter-insurgents.
Sometimes the tussle for number one has the frisson of a generational clash. It's unlikely that anybody who bought Ride a White Swan by T Rex (1970) was also a fan of its vanquisher, Clive Dunn's Grandad. Similarly, Deee-Lite's neo-disco classic Groove Is in the Heart (1990) lost out by a whisker to a reissue of the Steve Miller Band's The Joker. One popular myth contends that God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols was deliberately held off number one by a shadowy cabal during the 1977 jubilee. The mundane truth is that more people wanted to hear Rod Stewart sing I Don't Want to Talk About It, and Rod Stewart fans are nobody's idea of a shadowy cabal.
"It's worse when the record that gets to number one is a record your parents might have bought," says David Roberts, editor of British Hit Singles. "I remember being gutted when Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever was prevented from getting to number one by Engelbert Humperdinck's Please Release Me [1967]."
On some occasions, however, the number one single is the lesser of two evils. Mull of Kintyre may not be Paul McCartney's finest but at least it fended off the Floral Dance by the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band in 1977, while John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John's You're the One That I Want saved us from Father Abraham and the Smurfs. And despite their notoriety, some interminable number ones created few miscarriages of pop justice. Bryan Adams's 16-week reign with (Everything I Do) I Do It for You (1991) is still remembered with a shudder but none of the records it blocked from the top - by Jason Donovan, Heavy D and the Boyz, Right Said Fred, Salt-N-Pepa, the Scorpions and 2 Unlimited - were great losses to posterity.
Similarly Wet Wet Wet's Love Is All Around (1994) frustrated only the forgettable Big Mountain, All-4-One and Let Loose. Conversely, there are the rare times when both the top two singles are classics. You can't complain about a week when the Rolling Stones' Paint It Black keeps down Wild Thing by the Troggs (1966), or Bowie's Space Oddity pips Roxy Music's Love Is the Drug (1975).
The question is whether it really matters who charted where. Deee-Lite's Lady Miss Kier insists: "It didn't matter then and it doesn't matter now." Midge Ure, formerly chief overcoat-wearer in Ultravox, cheerfully told Twos on 2 that Vienna both outlasted and outsold Shaddap You Face. And time can blur memories - certain records acquire the glow of a number one in retrospect.
"If you asked someone if Wonderwall or Strawberry Fields Forever got to number one, I think most people would say yes," says Swern. "I think people believe things like Holiday by Madonna or Rocket Man by Elton John got to number one, just because they were great records."
The peculiar pleasures of chart-watching are, however, increasingly hard to come by. We are in the era of the one-week number one, given saturation airplay for weeks in advance, eased into place with the crushing predictability of an Iranian election and instantly forgotten. Even under harsh interrogation, most people couldn't name more than two of Westlife's 11 number ones.
"I think that's why there isn't quite the same interest in the pop charts," says Swern, a little sadly. "Because of the way the record industry now markets records, a record will go into the charts on release date and that's as far as it will go. For me, part of the fun of watching the charts was watching your favourite record climbing up. They took weeks or months. Gary Glitter's first record, Rock and Roll (Parts 1 & 2), took about eight months to make it to number 2. But now you know that once it's in, it's 95% certain that the only way is down."
Yet still the British record-buyer manages to rock the boat from time to time, whether by pushing the Darkness into the number two slot and making Gary Jules's beautifully maudlin Mad World the least festive Christmas number one ever, or by keeping OutKast's Hey Ya! bobbing up and down the top 10 for months. Kelis's Milkshake, trapped in the shadow of Pop Idol winner Michelle McManus in January, was a genuinely popular hit worthy of a slot on Twos on 2.
It's this waywardness, regardless of the quality of the records in question, that gives the charts their colour and drama. If all the alleged injustices could be corrected, and the one-hit wonders expunged, chart history would become as humdrum and canonical as any of the magazine or radio polls that can be summed up as: Stop Press, Beatles Still Good. And runners-up should remember that coming second has its own cachet. As Buzz Aldrin once said on the Simpsons: "Second comes right after first."
· Twos on 2 is out now on BBC/Universal.