(Credits: Far Out / Billboard Charts / Immo Wegmann)
Sun 22 February 2026 2:00, UK
If you saw the hit supernatural rom-com Ghost at the cinema way back in 1990, you might recall how it helped The Righteous Brothers’ 1965 version of ‘Unchained Melody’ return to the pop charts, thanks to the famous scene in which Patrick Swayze’s Sam and Demi Moore’s Molly get extra sensual making pottery together.
However, that wasn’t the only hit single from ‘65 to feature prominently in that film. After Sam gets killed and becomes a ghost (spoiler alert), he discovers that he can communicate with a previously phoney psychic named Oda Mae Brown, played by Whoopi Goldberg, and wants her to help him reconnect with Molly and investigate his own murder.
She doesn’t want to get involved, so, as his last resort, Sam decides that he’ll have to be as annoying as possible, infuriatingly obnoxious, in order to get the psychic’s assistance, and toward that end, he starts singing ‘I’m Henry VIII, I Am’ at the top of his lungs in the middle of the night, as Oda Mae is trying to sleep.
The ploy works, I suppose, because ‘I’m Henry VIII, I Am’ was essentially written for the purpose of being obnoxious. While most Americans came to know the song when Herman’s Hermits made it an extremely bizarre number one hit in the States in the summer of 1965, sandwiched between ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ and ‘I Got You Babe’, the tune actually has its origins way back in the British music hall days of the 1910s, when songwriters Fred Murray and RP Weston created it as one of the signature songs of the comedic cockney performer Harry Champion.
In the original version, the song’s title is spelt out as ‘I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am’, leaning into the cockney accent. That vocal delivery was maintained in the song’s 1961 revival by the singer Joe Brown, and again in Herman’s Hermits’ cover four years later, who changed the spelling of the title to ‘Henry’, perhaps because they’d decided to release the song as a single in America, and not in the UK, a seemingly backwards idea that clearly paid off in the end. Americans hadn’t heard the Joe Brown version, let alone the old Harry Champion version, so it came across as something completely novel and appealingly Dickensian in the midst of the British invasion.
Herman’s Hermits were also still riding high off their first big US hit, ‘Mrs Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’, which went to number one earlier in 1965. This gave them a built-in audience, mostly of screaming young girls, who were willing to race out and buy a novelty record about a 16th century king and his latest bride: “I’m ‘enery the Eighth I am / ‘enery the Eighth I am, I am / I got married to the widow next door / She’s been married seven times before”.
Famously, singer Peter Noone runs through each verse “same as the first”, and the whole song is over and done in less than two minutes. It’s a remarkably batshit record for a little girl somewhere in Oklahoma to be singing along to, but this was the rapidly changing world that pop music had helped create.
In fairness to ‘I am Henry VIII’, the Hermits’ performance of the song was both tongue-in-cheek and cheeky, and the rapid-fire guitar on the record was a legit influence on the Ramones as they harnessed their sound a decade later. Still, as number one hits go, it’s hard to find another throwaway quite on this level during one of the most fruitful periods in pop history.
Just look at 1965 alone, when the US Billboard was topped by the likes of The Temptations’ ‘My Girl’, The Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’, The Byrds’ ‘Turn Turn Turn’, and The Supremes’ ‘Stop in the Name of Love’. Competition was tough, and ‘enery the Eighth’ was a bit of a silly dud that cut its way to the front of the queue for one week. More power to ‘em, but this was still, perhaps, the worst number one of the decade.