The 20th of February 1972
Official U.K. Singles Chart results from Sunday the 20th to Saturday the 26th of February 1972
Cut-off for sales figures was up to the end of Saturday the 19th of February
Results counted from Sunday the 20th,
announced on Tuesday the 22nd,
and broadcast on B.B.C. Radio 1 on Sunday the 27th of February 1972.
Nilsson
Without You
At No.5, on the the U.K. Top 50 Singles Chart the day I am born, is Nilsson with “Without You”.
Entering the Top 5 songs in the U.K. Singles Chart on this date,..
…and now we’re hitting the big guns.
Harry Nilsson only just got himself into the Top 50 a few weeks ago, when he entered the chart at No.50 on the 30th of January 1972 with this Badfinger song, which will ultimately end up having a devastating legacy for the two writers who composed it, Pete Ham (Verses) and Tom Evans (Chorus).
I’ve already featured Pete and Tom already,..
…due to them being the two key songwriters in the group ‘Badfinger’ who are just a few places back in this chart.
Pete’s half of this current song…
…had been titled “If It’s Love”, but it lacked an impactful chorus.
His lyric had come about after an instance where he and his girlfriend had made plans to go out for the evening.
Tom, at the last minute, interrupted their preparations, and told Pete about a song idea he needed to tell him about.
Pete brushed him off, telling Tom he’d promised his girlfriend that it would be their evening.
However, Pete’s girlfriend noticed how this intrusion was now playing on his mind, and decided it was OK if he wanted to go through the song idea with Tom.
Looking at his girlfriend, Pete said “Your mouth is smiling, but your eyes are sad.” And that night he wrote the lyric “Well I can’t forget tomorrow, when I think of all my sorrow, I had you there but then I let you go, and now it’s only fair that I should let you know … if it’s love”
Tom’s chorus…
…came about due to fears he had lost his own girlfriend (and future wife).
In a frantic state of mind, he visited his girlfriend’s best friend to tell her he feared he’d lost her, telling her “She’s left me. I need her back. I can’t live without her.”
Flying all the way to the German city of Bonn to try and locate her and to reconcile the relationship, he wrote a song called “I Can’t Live” which had the chorus “I can’t live, if living is without you, I can’t live, I can’t give any more.”
After both Pete and Tom put together their experiences of love and loss, the result would be (for them anyway) a song which, though heartfelt, didn’t feel like it would be anything other than a great closer to the first side of their next album. This is why their version sounds more like a demo than a hit single.
It would take others to see its potential.
Harry Nilsson, had been quite prolific himself for a while now.
Born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York back in 1941, he moved from the East Coast to the West Coast while still in his teens and, due to the family’s dire financial situation at the time, began working, initially at the Paramount Theatre movie palace in Los Angeles, but then discovering an aptitude for basic computer programming (and lying about his actual age of 15), he managed to get a job at a bank, working on the computers at night, while taking up writing songs during the day.
With his uncle coaching his singing, Harry taught himself guitar and piano from musical artists he’d meet, and managed to get a job singing demos for acclaimed Canadian composer, producer, musician and publisher Scott Turner, who had written hits for, amongst many others, Buddy Holly, Guy Mitchell, Slim Whitman and Tammy Wynette.
Eventually, Harry managed to secure his own contract, and recorded under the name Johnny Niles.
Although Harry’s singing career…
…wasn’t really setting anything on fire at this point, his compositions were gaining attention, with many contemporary artists selecting his songs for their own albums, such as his song “Without Her”, which would be covered by a plethora of artists including Glen Campbell, Jack Jones, Lulu, Julie London, and Blood Sweat & Tears, to name just a few.
Because of the demand for his songwriting skills, he worked out it was paying enough so he could finally jack in the night time job at the bank, and concentrate fully on songwriting and music composition.
It wasn’t much longer before Harry’s recordings gained their own attention.
One such recipient, after hearing his innovative 2nd album ‘Pandemonium Shadow Show’, was Beatles press officer Derek Taylor, who was so impressed, he ordered a whole crate of the new album to be shipped over to Beatles HQ for him to hand out to whichever lucky recipient he chose.
It could well have been a certain track which had piqued his interest which demonstrated a groundbreaking new concept type, ‘a mash-up’, the first of its kind, where Harry had taken the Beatles song “You Can’t Do That” and managed to insert another 17 or so Beatles songs throughout it’s duration.
By the time the Beatles held a press conference…
…later that year to announce their new Apple venture, when both were asked who was their current favourite act, both Paul and John answered ‘Nilsson’.
From that point on, the demand for information on Harry sky-rocketed.
With his new found star power, he obtained a new recording contract with RCA, with his own office, where he could write his material, and personally take phone calls from the press and musical peers.
But it would be a track off his next album, “Everybody’s Talkin'” which would send him into a whole new realm, when it was selected to be in the film ‘Midnight Cowboy’.
From here,..
…the world was basically his oyster, not that he wanted to move anywhere anytime soon, due to his dislike of the idea of touring, or even making appearances.
He spent the next couple of years creating and honing his craft, even managing another first for the music industry, when he combined his first two LP’s and invented the remix album. He even created a children’s record, along with its own commissioned animated film.
After flying over to England, and attending a party in London,..
…Harry first heard, what he thought at the time, a new song by the Beatles.
When he found that it wasn’t them who were playing on the track, he immediately wanted to record the song for himself, just changing the original guitar based arrangement to a piano led one instead, still keeping it simple.
However, it would be his producer, the soon-to-be-legendary Richard Perry, that had other ideas, and who persuaded him it needed the full works. A big powerful sound with an orchestral backing.
Once again, Harry would inadvertently invent something never heard before. The resulting makeover would turn Badfinger’s simple song into an astonishing new type of concept.
The power ballad.
After it’s quiet start on the 30th of January,..
…the single leapt into the Top 30 two weeks ago, when it positioned itself at No.27.
The last week, it had broken the Top 20 and sat at No.16.
And from here, at this week’s No.5 position, now that this leviathan of a tune has taken hold, there is no stopping it’s ascent.
The week after this one will see it reach the Top 3.
And it will confidently strike No.1 on the 3rd of March, and nothing will displace it for 5 solid weeks.
Even when it does fall from the very top, it will still have enough power to keep it in the Top 10 for the duration of April, only beginning to drop further during May.
Ultimately, “Without You” will spend a massive 20 weeks in the U.K. Chart, with 11 of those in the Top 10 alone.
The journey had started in the depths of Winter and it will end well into the beginning of Summer.
Harry’s last day on the U.K Chart with this current single, will be on Saturday the 17th of June, but the song would become the benchmark for big emotional heartfelt hits, and witness the birth of a new era in pop music composition.
Ultimately, the ballad would go on to have a life of its own,..
…way beyond anyone’s expectations, even the composer of Badfinger’s first breakthrough hit Paul McCartney, who described the piece as “the killer song of all time”.
High praise indeed, but which, in hindsight, probably wasn’t the best choice of words to describe it.
With such huge success at this point in their careers, Pete Ham and Tom Evans should have been well on their way to becoming millionaires. However, bad advice, judgement, heart-breakingly bad decisions, whatever you want to call it, ultimately left both of them feeling penniless, depressed and vulnerable.
Such was the flip side of the music industry back then, that after putting their hearts and souls into their songs, and at the time not receiving the royalties they fully deserved, they felt they both had nothing left to give; and so, within ten years of each other, they made the ultimate sacrifice, and left their young families and friends, and this existence, for all the wrong reasons.
It has become one of the most unbelievably distressing moments ever to have darkened the beauty of the wonderful world of music itself.
Nothing should have to come to the point, no matter what the cost seems to be, that someone feels that the only way to stop all the pain, is to pay with their own life.
No one should have to feel like that.
No one.
The “A” Side
The “B” Side
Badfinger – Without You (TV Appearance)
Nilsson – Gotta Get Up (TV Performance)
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