![]() “When I Need You” has a nice hook, but Hammond didn’t come up with it himself. A different version of the song will eventually appear in this column.) (The Mindbenders’ “A Groovy Kind Of Love” is a 6. Sager had co-written “ A Groovy Kind Of Love,” a 1965 single from the Mindbenders that had peaked at #2. Hammond misses someone, and he knows that she misses him: “It’s not easy when the road is your driver/ Honey, that’s a heavy load that we bear.” So he sings to her about that loneliness: “Miles and miles of empty space in between us/ A telephone can’t take the place of your smile.” Hammond wrote the song’s music, and Carole Bayer Sager wrote the lyrics. That album’s title track is a ballad about the lovelorn life of a touring musician. In 1977, Albert Hammond released an album called When I Need You. Only one Strokes single has ever charted on the Hot 100: 2005’s “Juicebox,” which peaked at #98.) If you are reading Stereogum, then you probably already know that Albert Hammond, Jr. (That one chart hit is more than his son ever managed, though. In 1972, Hammond made it to #5 with his solo song “ It Never Rains In Southern California.” (That song is a 5.) Hammond kept putting out solo records for years afterwards, and he never came anywhere near the top 10. (It’s an 8.) That’s a 25-year chart run.Īs a performer, though, Albert Hammond only ever had one real hit. “Don’t Turn Around,” a song that Hammond and Diane Warren wrote for Tina Turner in 1986, became a #4 hit for Ace Of Base in 1993. (It’s a 7.) And Hammond was still showing up on the pop charts into the ’90s. He is partially responsible, for instance, for Whitney Houston’s “ One Moment In Time,” which peaked at #5 in 1988. (It peaked at #9, and it’s a 4.) And Hammond kept writing big songs into the late ’80s. He first landed in the top 10 when he co-wrote the Pipkins’ “ Gimme Dat Ding” in 1970. Hammond co-wrote his first hit - Leapy Lee’s “ Little Arrows,” which peaked at #16 - in 1968. It was a cover of someone else’s not-especially-original song.Īlbert Hammond had a long, long run writing hits for other people. ![]() Sayer didn’t have anything to do with writing that one. But that same Perry-produced album, 1976’s Endless Flight, also had Sayer’s second and final #1 hit. Sayer actually did co-write his first #1 hit, the loathsome “ You Make Me Feel Like Dancing.” That song was basically a studio improvisation, and it clearly did well for him. So he had to do what he had to do, even if that meant swallowing his pride and throwing his own songs away. ![]() Sayer, who’d made a few hits but who was mostly only famous in his native UK, was essentially getting called up to the majors when he got to work with Perry. That’s a pretty heavy blow for an artist, to be told that none of these songs are of any interest to me.” As recounted in Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, Perry once told this to Rolling Stone: “When I first started working with Leo, he came in with a cassette of 12 new songs, none of which got recorded. But when he took his songs to Richard Perry, the star-making producer who’d notched hits with people like Nilsson and Carly Simon, Perry rejected all of Sayer’s demos. So Leo Sayer knew how to write a pop song. Sayer made his first impact on the US charts in 1974, when Three Dog Night covered his UK hit “ The Show Must Go On” to #4. “Giving It All Away” didn’t chart in the US, but it was a #5 hit in the UK. Sayer and David Courtney wrote 1973’s “ Giving It All Away,” the debut solo single from the Who’s Roger Daltrey, before Sayer came out with any songs of his own. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.īefore he found fame as a pop singer and literal clown, Leo Sayer was a songwriter.
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