Single release: Goodnight Tonight by Wings

Wings’ single ‘Goodnight Tonight’ was released worldwide on 23 March 1979.

It was the band’s first single since the London Town album. The b-side, ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering’, was initially to have been the lead song, but was switched prior to the release.

We had a meeting and decided that it would be nice to have a single while the TV show, Wings Over The World, was out, because it had been something like seven months since we’d put a record out. ‘Goodnight Tonight’ was going to be the b-side and ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering’ was going to be the a-side. So we sat around for years, well it seemed like years, discussing it, you know, the normal soul-searching you go through, and we decided, ‘No, it isn’t all right. We won’t put it out.’ So we scrapped the whole thing and about a week later, I played the record again and I thought, ‘That’s crazy! We’ve made it. It’s stupid, why not put it out? Just because people are going to pan it.’ I liked it and other people had taken it home and played it to people at parties. So we decided to do it.

The song was issued on 7″ and 12″ singles. The latter contained ‘Goodnight Tonight’ (Long Version), which was the full length 7:15 version; the 7″ contained an edit. The b-side in both instances was ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering’.

‘Goodnight Tonight’ reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100 on 26 May, where it remained for two weeks. It spent 16 weeks on the chart.

In the UK it also peaked at number five, on 5 May, and spent 10 weeks on the singles chart.

It’s like the disco version of ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’, only put more genteelly.