Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield’s “(Is This The Way To) Amarillo” is certainly not the one composition impressed by the city in Texas. George Strait’s “Amarillo By Morning” and songs titled “Amarillo” by each Emmylou Harris and Gorillaz additionally come to thoughts. However within the mid-2000s, the Sedaka tune, first made into a success by English singer Tony Christie in 1971, was capturing the creativeness of the British public as by no means earlier than.
Even the primary time round, the tune was extra of a British favourite than within the US. Sedaka wrote it in direction of the top of his long-term writing relationship with Greenfield, and though they had been collectively for the singer-pianist’s exceptional profession resurgence of the Nineteen Seventies, Sedaka didn’t launch his personal single of it till 1977. By then, the jaunty quantity had lengthy been one in every of Christie’s signature songs.
The massive-voiced, Sheffield-born singer had labored his method to prominence via the working males’s membership circuit within the Nineteen Sixties. He made his UK chart breakthrough in 1971, and after a High 30 hit with “Las Vegas,” he hit paydirt with “I Did What I Did For Maria.” The dramatic Mitch Murray-Peter Callandar composition and manufacturing turned a No.2 hit.
A European smash
“(Is This The Way To) Amarillo” was the follow-up single, and reached a UK peak of No.18 early in 1972. It spent a considerable 11 weeks within the UK High 40 however turned a a lot larger hit on the continent, reaching No.1 in Germany and Spain.
In 2002, British comic Peter Kay introduced the tune new prominence when he featured it on his hit sequence Phoenix Nights. Three years later, Christie’s unique model was chosen as a fundraiser for the Comedian Aid charity. Propelled by a video with Kay, it shot straight to No.1, with first-week gross sales of 266,844.
On Might 1, 2005, “Amarillo” began its seventh week on the UK chart summit, the longest run at No.1 since Cher’s “Believe” in 1998. Its gross sales to the top of that week stood at 932,982, together with the recently-incorporated obtain format, which meant it had offered greater than thrice as many copies as another single in 2005 to that time.
1,000,000 UK gross sales
When the year-end gross sales tallies had been computed, Christie’s tune was the bestselling single of the yr by a good distance. Its official complete of 1,100,233 didn’t even embody almost 40,000 digital gross sales earlier than that format was first included within the chart computation, throughout its run at No.1.
In 2010, within the Performing Rights Society (PRS) journal M, Sedaka instructed this author concerning the origins of the tune, and its revival. “I used to love ‘Hitching a Ride,’ by [late 60s British pop outfit] Vanity Fare, that was that beat. I remember getting a call [in 2005] from Tony saying it had gone to No.1. Then someone said they went to a football game and 50,000 were singing it,” he added. “It was such a happy anthem.”
