The 20th of February 1974
Official U.K. Singles Chart results from Sunday the 17th to Saturday the 23rd of February 1974
Cut-off for sales figures was up to the end of Saturday the 16th of February
Results counted from Sunday the 17th,
published on Tuesday the 19th,
and broadcast on B.B.C. Radio 1 on Sunday the 24th of February 1974.
Roy Wood
Forever
At No.41, on the “The Top 50 U.K. Singles Chart”, the week of my 2nd Birthday, is Roy Wood with Forever.
The usually flamboyant and eccentric Roy…
…must have been easily bored around this time of his career.
In the space of a few years, he’d helped morph The Move into The Electric Light Orchestra; then in even less time during that project, walked off to form Wizzard, taking half of the “Orchestra” with him.
Now, he was having ideas that even his new group couldn’t contain.
Roy’s song could have been inspired…
…after listening to Jeff Lynne‘s re-imagining of Chuck Berry’s single Roll Over Beethoven; a tune which had been covered many times since, including by Jeff’s ultimate teenage favourites The Beatles. With Roy’s old group The Electric Light Orchestra, that single had charted the previous winter. Maybe this was his reply to Jeff’s initial throwback idea.
On this song,..
…Roy did everything himself.
He played every instrument, sung on it, provided all the multilayered backing vocals; he most probably made his own tea and cooked his own dinner on it too.
With a striking resemblance to the sounds of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, which would come to be defined as the American Brill Building pop sound (he even comments on the label “with special thanks to Brian Wilson and Neil Sedaka for their influence”), this is Roy’s humble tribute to the artists which shaped him as he was growing up. A deeply personal tribute to the ever growing distance of his youth.
This song therefore didn’t fit into any of his other musical ventures, this one had to be just him. No backing band, no make-up. Just Roy himself – pure and simple.
The single first entered the chart…
…exactly a month before Christmas, one place lower than this week in fact. It scaled ten places further to No.32 in its second week but stepped only one place higher to No.31 for its third.
The big jump occurred the week leading up to the holiday revelry, when the single leapt up to No.11 and would stay there for 3 weeks. I would like to say he narrowly missed out having a festive Top 10 hit, but he was already in there, further up the chart at No.4, shaking his baubles with Wizzard.
As the single entered into the new year of 1974,..
…and his multl-coloured, multi-layered and verging on rumbustious group jingled their way out of the charts, so this solo single found its opportunity to move onward and upward into Top 10 territory, eventually settling at its peak position of No.8 for a week from the 20th of January.
Another couple of weeks in the Top 10 would follow, before it began falling back, firstly to No.18 from the 10th of February, which happened to be last week.
This week would see the single’s biggest drop, to just outside the Top 40, before leaving forever…
…for now.
The “A” Side
The “B” Side
Roy Wood – Forever (Top of the Pops appearance – 20th December 1973)
Roy Wood – Forever (promotional video)
Roy Wood – Forever (Top of the Pops rehearsal footage)
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