THIS WEEK IN 1994
1 Come On You Reds Manchester United Football Squad
2 Love Is All Around Wet Wet Wet
3 Around The World East 17
4 Inside Stiltskin
5 Get-A-Way Maxx
6 The Real Thing 2 Unlimited
7 Sweets For My Sweet CJ Lewis
8 More To This World Bad Boys Inc
9 No Good (Start The Dance) Prodigy
10 Just A Step From Heaven Eternal
Manchester United were on a high back in 1994 when the squad recorded and released ‘Come On Your Reds’ with the help of Status Quo. They were that year’s Premier League champions and also lifted the FA Cup, beating Chelsea 4-0 on a rainy May afternoon to become only the fourth team of the 20th Century to do ‘the double’.
‘Come On You Reds’ was based on Quo’s 1988 number 5 hit ‘Burning Bridges’, with changed lyrics. It spent two weeks at number one in the UK as well as topping the chart in Denmark and reaching No. 2 in Ireland. It remains the only football single by a club side to make number one in the UK.
• Man U held ‘Love Is All Around’, from the soundtrack of ‘Four Weddings And A Funeral’, off the top spot for two weeks before capitulating on May 29. Wet Wet Wet’s cover of The Troggs’ hit from 1967 would spend an unbelievable 15 consecutive weeks at the top of the chart, a feat only bettered by Bryan Adams’ ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’, which spent 16 weeks on top in 1991, and then equalled by Drake’s ‘One Dance’ in 2016.
There was a backlash to the populatity of ‘Love Is All Around’: radio listeners tired of the song as the weeks at number one rolled on, and some radio stations removed it from their playlists. Wet Wet Wet eventually removed it from sale altogether, their singer Marti Pellow later reflecting: ‘we did everybody’s head in’.
Troggs’ lead singler Reg Presley, who wrote the song, famously used his considerable royalties from the cover to fund research into subjects such as crop circles, alien spacecraft and alchemy. He died in 2013 at the age of 71. – Jim Hayes