In the early Nineties, Wet Wet Wet approached their record company with a demand. “We said, ‘We want to do a James Bond theme,’” says bassist Graeme Clark. The Glaswegian band were big – their soulful soft rock had yielded them two number one singles by this point – but they weren’t Bond big. This was reflected in label Polygram’s response.
“They said, ‘We can’t get you that. But we can get you this Four Weddings and a Funeral movie.’ And we went, ‘It’s not f–king James Bond is it, man? Come on, f–king get yer finger out,’” recalls Clark. But 007 was not to be. It was the low budget Hugh Grant rom-com or nothing. “This was the only thing on offer and we were, like, ‘OK let’s just do it.’”
The decision changed their lives. Wet Wet Wet’s theme for the Richard Curtis-penned film, a cover of The Troggs’ 1967 track “Love Is All Around,” became the inescapable song of the summer of 1994. Entering the charts 30 years ago, it topped the chart for a mammoth 15 weeks. Three decades on, “Love Is All Around” remains Britain’s best-selling love ballad of all time, having sold almost two million copies (Four Weddings itself became, for a while, the highest-grossing British film ever).
The song made millionaires of Wet Wet Wet. It would have hung around in the chart for even longer had there not been a backlash against its ubiquity. Jarvis Cocker from indie band Pulp appeared on Top of the Pops with a sign saying “I hate Wet Wet Wet” taped inside his jacket. Sick of hearing singer Marti Pellow’s honeyed croon, people reportedly broke into pub jukeboxes to forcibly remove the single from the machines.
Even the band grew tired of the song. After being number one for over a quarter of the year they ordered Polygram to stop pressing copies. “Eventually they threw it into the bottom of the ocean somewhere,” chuckles Four Weddings producer Duncan Kenworthy. Still, he says it’s “amazing” we’re still talking about it after all this time.
For millions of Brits the song remains a time stamp of both an era and a feeling: the feel-good romance between Grant’s Charles and Andie MacDowell’s Carrie; Duckface and Scarlett; friendship and weddings. The song “just makes you think of wonderful summer weekends and the sun shining and being in love”, says Kenworthy. John Lunn, who was music researcher on Four Weddings and went on to write the music for Downton Abbey and The Last Kingdom, tells me it’s “just one of those songs that makes you feel good, no matter whether you’re in love or not”. And all these feelings are evoked in just 12 words: “I feel it in my fingers/ I feel it in my toes.”
“We want to do a James Bond theme.”
Three songs were in contention to be covered to become Four Weddings’ flagship anthem: Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You,” and “Love Is All Around.” Kenworthy recalls writer Curtis arriving at an early production meeting carrying a bundle of CDs or albums. “Richard Curtis is a bit of a pop music god, and he was the one who brought in a whole lot of music and played it. When The Troggs first recorded ‘Love Is All Around’ I was 17. [When Curtis played it] I thought it was fantastic and leapt at it. I said, ‘We’ve got to have that,’” says Kenworthy, then making his first film. The song had other unlikely fans at this time. Jangly US indie rockers REM recorded a version of the track in 1991. Bassist Mike Mills called it “one of the best love songs ever written” because it was “sentimental without being shmaltzy”.
Wet Wet Wet’s Pellow has said that covering the song was a “no-brainer” because the band “knew we could make it our own”. The group – which comprised four main members plus a long-term fifth guitarist called Graeme Duffin – slowed it down, changed the key and added an epic-sounding opening. They recorded their version in just half a day. The Wets sent a copy to The Troggs’ Reg Presley, who wrote it. “Thankfully, he loved it. Imagine if he thought we’d assassinated it,” said Pellow.
Although happy, the band weren’t totally convinced. They figured that “Love Is All Around” would make a “nice B-side” at best, says Clark. But people close to them started telling them how good it was. The bass player’s father-in-law – “a Dire Straits fan who doesn’t particularly gravitate towards Wet Wet Wet” – said it was the best thing they’d ever done, while the band’s string arranger Fiachra Trench, who’d written the string parts on The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York,” thought it was “fantastic”. Clark knew “something special was happening” when he and his family were flown to Los Angeles first class for the track to be mixed by Bob Clearmountain. “Bob said, ‘This is great.’ We never got complimented. And this is Bruce Springsteen’s engineer!” he says.
The song’s release on May 9 1994 was boosted by the UK premiere of Four Weddings in Leicester Square two days later. The song charted that weekend at number four. Two weeks later, it reached number one. Kenworthy puts the song’s appeal down to its measured tempo, simplicity and romantic lyrics. When allied to the film, a “symbiosis” occurred. “Adding music to films is the most wonderful experience because you get this double whammy and suddenly colors that you didn’t really notice before – in both the music and the images – have this rather amazing chemistry. People just went for it,” says Kenworthy.
Three decades on, “Love Is All Around” remains Britain’s best-selling love ballad of all time.
Realizing they’d moved beyond their usual audience, Wet Wet Wet capitalized on the success by embarking on the cleverly named Summer of Love Is All Around Tour. But the song was so omnipresent that it soon started “feeling like someone else’s record”, Clark says. They felt like they were living under a “magnifying glass” yet were still selling 120,000 copies a week. “I was like, ‘Who the f–k is still buying this record after 15 weeks?’” says the bass player. Pellow admitted that the song was driving him “insane”, and The Sun ran the headline: “Get my no 1 hit out of the charts now – tormented Wets star Marti Pellow’s amazing plea to manager”.
On the band’s orders, Polygram stopped printing copies of “Love Is All Around” on September 13 1994. By this point the song had dropped to number two in the chart, replaced at the top by Whigfield’s “Saturday Night.” Had it been number one for another week, it would have drawn level with Bryan Adams’ “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” as the UK’s longest-running unbroken number one single.
Money rolled in. The late Presley said he got a “very nice chunk” of money (he spent some on research into crop circles). And Clark says that at one point more than $12 million came to Wet Wet Wet in royalty payments. The band’s career received a second wind and they had another chart-topping album. But the huge fame and success was a prelude to turbulence. “We got to that pinnacle, and then the only way from there is down,” says Clark, adding that all the money led to a “temporary insanity” descending. “There was buying property, expensive holidays, expensive marriages,” he says. Excess too. The band still tour today, but Clark and Duffin are the only original members.
The song went on to have its own second wind, appearing in Curtis’s 2003 film Love Actually as the repurposed “Christmas Is All Around,” sung by Bill Nighy’s washed-out rocker Billy Mack. That film ends with Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister saying, “If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling that you’ll find that love actually is all around.”
Clark says you “can’t legislate” for success like “Love Is All Around.” All these years later, Kenworthy can still hardly believe his luck: “Being the first film, its huge success was so unexpected and so it was like constantly getting gifts. Thank goodness for Wet Wet Wet.”
It wasn’t a sentence much heard during the long, hot summer of 1994.
James Hall is a London-based freelance journalist and a music critic at The Telegraph
