Number of Weeks? 1
What else was going on? The first James Bond novel is published
No youtube video available
It's taken almost half a year but finally, a group ascends to the number 1 spot (if only for a week). Perhaps most significantly, this is the first instance of a UK act reaching the top, which demonstrates the influence and dominance that the USA had over popular music in the 1950s. For all its significance for British music, however, it has to be admitted that this isn't perhaps the best song. The Stargazers were a fairly middle of the road vocal harmony group and certainly on this song they do that job perfectly competently. Indeed, the vocals are once again top notch. Sadly, however, the song is a fairly pedestrian ballad lamenting lost love and really fails to go anywhere or really hold the attention. The exception being the orchestration of the opening which for some reason puts me in mind of the opening to Garth Marenghi's "Darkplace". It's somewhat bizarre to consider just how much the instrumentation has changed so that instruments and sounds which appear to be quite commonplace in the 50s (blaring, seemingly slightly off key pianos, for example) seem really alien to a modern listener.
But I'm rambling. On the one hand, it's great that this song finally catapulted a British act to the top of our very own charts. On the other, I just wish it could have been with a punchier offering. Yet, given what knocked it off the top spot, perhaps The Stargazers were the lesser of two evils...
What happened next? We'll see The Stargazers again at the beginning of next year, but their chart career continues well into the mid-fifties.
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