(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 26 September 2025 6:00, UK
The Beatles are often celebrated for the versatility they insisted on throughout their time as a band; however, regardless of the whackier waters they chose to sail, they always placed on the charts.
Listening to their discography is a real treat, as you get to hear the growth of the band from one album to the next. You get straightforward, catchy pop tracks from the beginning of their career, like ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, which would get even the stiffest of toes and heads tapping and nodding and really put The Beatles on the platform they were able to grow on.
Then you listen to some of their later albums, such as Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The White Album, for the more experimental lilt to them. The adoring string sections in tracks like ‘A Day in the Life’ and the ambitious abstractness of recordings such as ‘Revolution 9’ were a step left field for the Fab Four, which helped launch the notion of counterculture and made them a permanent fixture on the map of pioneering. However, even within these more serving themselves numbers, the band found hits.
It’s easy to be impressed admiring the great songs that The Beatles have been responsible for, and one of the most successful tracks that came from this seemingly bottomless pit of successes was the track ‘Hey Jude’. Have you ever heard a song that was more fitting of the number-one spot in the charts than that? It’s sweet throughout, but then has a large, floor-filling outro which you can still hear belted by crowds on dancefloors and in football stadiums today.
The success of the song spoke for itself; you don’t need to read into it too much. It stayed at number one for nine weeks and became one of the most talked about songs of the decade. Yes, there were many a great track that missed out on the chance to top the charts because of ‘Hey Jude’, and one of those tracks that had to settle for number two might surprise you.
When you think of songs that sit at the top of the charts, you think of catchy tunes that appeal to the masses, not funk-rock numbers sung by eccentrics with fire coming out of their head. However, when ‘Hey Jude’ went to number one, the man who was stuck with the silver medal was Arthur Brown. If you haven’t listened to or watched him, you should, as he’s one of the most entertaining musicians on the planet, but he isn’t someone you would think is capable of becoming a mainstream artist. It didn’t look as though the song would gain any traction at first, but thanks to a little help from his friends, Brown skyrocketed into the domain of popular music.
“When the underground radio stations first turned the song down as not being a ‘hit’, the label took it to the major stations who saw somebody with flames coming out of his head and thought it was an outrageous novelty record that would do well in the summertime,” said Brown, noting, “At the same time, Jimi Hendrix helped break ‘Fire’, because he was on the same US label as me, and took the record around the stations demanding: ‘Play this motherf*****!’”
The track eventually became a hit, but it wasn’t enough to get him that number-one spot, as even the might of Jimi Hendrix couldn’t take on the unrelenting force of ‘Hey Jude’. As someone who had always been an underground act, though, Brown was just happy the song had picked up traction.
“‘Everything opened up when ‘Fire’ became a hit,” he said, “and I went from being an underground figure who was regarded as strange to singing and playing with people that were my influences and heroes, like John Lee Hooker and Frank Zappa.” The silver medal didn’t deter the man; in fact it only made him more starstruck by his own celebrity as he trundled on.
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