A key date in The Beatles’ career came with the UK release of perhaps their finest single of all, the double a-side ‘Penny Lane’/‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
Although heralded upon its release as a major advance for the group – and, indeed, for Western music – the single failed to reach number one in the UK, the first time this had occurred since ‘Love Me Do’ in 1962.
Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever entered the charts on 23 February 1967, and climbed to number two. It was held off by Engelbert Humperdinck’s Release Me, and spent 11 weeks on the charts.
The failure to reach the top was because many chart compilers counted the double a-side as two individual releases; it did, in fact, outsell Release Me by nearly two to one.
It was pretty bad, wasn’t it, that Engelbert Humperdinck stopped Strawberry Fields Forever from getting to number one? But I don’t think it was a worry. At first, we wanted to have good chart positions, but then I think we started taking it for granted. It might have been a bit of a shock being number two – but then again, there were always so many different charts that you could be number two in one chart and number one in another.
Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever was issued as Parlophone R 5570. Initial copies came in a picture sleeve, unusually for the time. Indeed, only two Beatles singles were issued with picture sleeves in the UK, the other being ‘Let It Be’.
It’s fine if you’re kept from being number one by a record like Release Me, because you’re not trying to do the same kind of thing. That’s a completely different scene altogether.
George Martin later regretted not including the two songs on The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album.
The only reason that Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane didn’t go onto the new album was a feeling that if we issued a single, it shouldn’t go onto an album. That was a crazy idea, and I’m afraid I was partly responsible. It’s nonsense these days, but in those days it was an aspect that we’d try to give the public value for money.The idea of a double A side came from me and Brian, really. Brian was desperate to recover popularity, and so we wanted to make sure that we had a marvellous seller. He came to me and said, ‘I must have a really great single. What have you got?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got three tracks – and two of them are the best tracks they’ve ever made. We could put the two together and make a smashing single.’ We did, and it was a smashing single – but it was also a dreadful mistake. We would have sold far more and got higher up in the charts if we had issued one of those with, say, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ on the back.
Anthology
Strawberry Fields was always my favorite Beatles tune!
Another reason for not getting a No. 1 – BBC banned Strawberry Fields cos they assumed it was drug related. Wrong! They played Penny Lane despite it containing sexual content – 4 of 4 (bag of chips) & “finger pie”
“The failure to reach the top was because many chart compilers counted the double a-side as two individual releases; it did, in fact, outsell Release Me by nearly two to one.”
Untrue. Some charts had split up double A sides in the past, but that practice had stopped by 1967. PL/SFF was simply outsold by one of the biggest hits of the decade, fair and square.
It really doesn’t matter one way or the other, but just for the record, Billboard claims that PL/SF outsold “Release Me” by nearly two to one.
The Wikipedia article, drawing on Kenneth Womack’s Beatles’ Encyclopedia, claims that this was in the Record Retailer chart, which came to be accepted as the standard national chart although there were others. (For example, “Please Please Me” peaked at #2 on Record Retailer but topped most other charts, so it is now generally said to have peaked at #2).
You’re correct. As of 2012, “Release Me” was the 41st best selling single of all time in the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/nov/04/uk-million-selling-singles-full-list
Only five Beatles singles sold more than “Release Me” in the UK: She Loves You, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Can’t Buy Me Love, I Feel Fine and Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out.
So it’s possible another more commercial Beatles single might have knocked Engelbert off the top spot for a week, but Engelbert’s single would probably have been back to number one the next week.
“Release Me” was a huge hit that the older generation bought in large numbers, just as “The Sound Of Music” album outsold pretty much any rock album you can mention in the ’60s. Most Beatles singles would have been outsold by “Release Me”, not just this one.
It’s easy for you to write: “PL/SFF was simply outsold …” . Meanwhile, it’s not that “simple” at all. First of all, before February 1969 there was no official singles chart in the UK. Meanwhile, according to the Melody Maker charts, which were based on data from a much larger number of stores than e.g. the Record Retailer chart (247 to only 30), the PL/SFF single took first place for 3 weeks (from March 4, 1967) and the same was achieved by the single Release Me: 1 week – from February 25, 1967 and 2 weeks – from March 25, 1967.
So really: “… was simply outsold” and “… fair and square”? I don’t think so.
In the UK ‘Release Me’ got a Gold Disc for selling over 1 million and ‘Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields Forever’ only got a Silver Disc (sales about 700,000). Although the charts didn’t log weekly sales before 1969, the record companies knew overall sales.
That single would be a lovely collectible to have.
I had over 700 45s gathered from various sources, mainly in the 1960s.
My collection included four copies of Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever.
(And five copies of I Want To Hold Your Hand).
The records were kept without their sleeves in computer card trays so over time their condition deteriorated quite a bit.
When I emigrated from England to Australia in 1981 I took the records with me.
Last year I gave them all to a charity shop.
I was so lucky to have been a teenager during the Beatles era.
I think the Beatles’ music can be categorized like Beethoven’s, with early, middle and late periods. This single could be called the their finest of the late period. Being all of 10 years old when it came out (and having loved everything they did up to that point) I thought “Strawberry Fields” was very weird. I thought they were losing their minds, actually. But now I know better.
I agree with the characterization of early, middle and late, but Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane is clearly in the middle period, which begins with Rubber Soul and goes through Magical Mystery Tour.
If SF/PL had been held out and then included on Sgt Pepper, it would have cemented that album’s position as the greatest rock LP of all time. Leaving those two off greatly weakened Sgt Pepper.