Author: Stephen Schijns

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Music Sixties

The Hit Song by Nobody

In 1968, an Italian movie purporting to examine wild sex freedom in Sweden was released (in English, titled “Sweden Heaven and Hell”). It wasn’t much of a cinematic treasure, but during a sauna scene an insanely catchy song played. Composed by Piero Umiliani, it was performed by a “band” called Marc 4 (four session musicians) and the nonsense vocal part was sung by Italian singer/composer Alessandro Alessandroni and his wife Giulia.

A soundtrack album was duly created and in mid-1969 the tune, entitled entitled “Máh Ná Máh Ná”, was released as a single on the obscure Ariel label. Ariel clearly didn’t really understand the record business; they didn’t list an artist or performer on the disc, just noting it was from the movie Sweden Heaven and Hell.

Despite being uncredited, the song started to get some traction on radio and was played across North America in September 1969, peaking at No. 55 in the Billboard Hot 100 singles and #12 on their Adult Contemporary list. It made # 44 on the Cash Box magazine chart. In Canada, the song reached No. 22 in the RPM magazine top singles chart. Even when Columbia Records leased it from Ariel for release in Canada, no artist was listed.

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Music Sixties

“World Music” of The Sixties

Let’s take a look at the international spread of pop music in the 1960s. It goes without saying that the English-speaking pop music industry extended its reach around the globe during that decade, from the US and then the UK. Groups like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys, and singers like Petula Clark, Elvis Presley, and Stevie Wonder became household names in places like Italy, The Philippines, South Africa, Brazil, and Thailand. Their songs were covered in native languages, and their images were framed in bedrooms and schools around the world.

But what about the reverse? Were English-speaking countries ready to listen to pop music from other cultures? In other languages? Could a German rock star become world-famous? Or a Japanese pop group? Was there any mechanism for “international” pop stars to breach the American and UK markets?

We can examine the evidence, in the form of our international hit singles charts from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. We can look for performers who were based in countries other than the above; although some international performers ended up recording, performing, and living part-time in the US or UK, we draw no distinction here between those and others who “stayed at home” and let their music do the travelling. For the sake of argument, this list of “international” musicians will not include performers from Ireland (e.g. The Bachelors, Them / Van Morrison) on the premise that they wrote, sang, and performed in English and for all intents and purposes were part of the UK pop scene. Conversely, we do include French-language records made in Quebec that crossed over into the English Canadian charts.

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Radio Sixties

The Toronto Sound – In the 60s Charts

“The Toronto Sound”…what? There can be endless arguments about whether or not there was a distinct “Toronto Sound” in the 1960s, in the same vein as “surf music”, “the British Invasion”, or “the San Francisco psychedelic sound”. There is a strong case to be made that the Yonge Street club scene did, for a few years, generate a recognizable sound. 

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Music

Analytics

For a musician with such a small audience, this is pretty meaningless, but as a stats nerd it’s kind of interesting to track the popularity of my recordings. Here are the current on line results to the end of 2024:

What I can observe is that the “niche” songs that can be marketed to a specific audience (Yukoners, surf music lovers, power pop fans, 60s retro, etc.) can generate views more easily than a general rock song like “Fooling Yourself”. Videos that pop up in “suggested” algorithms, or in response to associated searches (e.g. “Yukon Rafting”) do well. “The Bad Man” benefited immensely from a “suggested” youtube algorithm, piling up all of its views within a first week, while streaming will take longer to occur.

 “What? Why?” leads in Bandcamp simply because it’s the first track on the album, and “MAP” is correspondingly in second place as the second track; listeners are giving the album a try, then fading out after a few songs. Interesting that Apple Music has pushed “MAP” and “Fully Committed” way more than the others, for some reason.

I’d note that “I’m Coming Over Tonight” had the benefit of being the first release and had a lot of friends and co-workers tuning in simply because of the novelty of me actually making a record; together with the “live band performance” video from 2018, the two versions combined would rank #2 overall.

All of the songs from #21 onwards are non-album tracks, and they will get a boost when I pull them into an album and push that. #27 and #30 are one-offs, while #31 and 32 will be released as singles in 2025.

I’d like to get more Spotify streams, because that shows an ongoing interest in the song, whereas the youtube videos tend to get watched once or twice only. Despite there being no money to be made from this (I make about $0.50 per month!), overall it’s nice to have made 20,000 musical impressions on the world!

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Music Radio Sixties

Domestic Substitution for International Hits

For a brief period in the mid-1960s In both Canada and Australia, a sub-industry grew up of local performers covering international hit records. In some instances the local outfit was able to record and release their version before the original single made it to the domestic market. This phenomenon was closely associated with the 1964 – 1966 “beat boom” era; earlier, the domestic groups, recording industry, and radio environment were still rather primitive and could not compete with international (particularly US) product, while later in the decade the premium placed on originality pushed the “cover band” to the fringes. Furthermore, performers realized that recording an original song would create much more net revenue than sending royalties off to a foreign songwriter.

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Music Radio Sixties

Canada’s International Pop Impact in the 60s

Let’s take a look at the Canadian performers who had entries on the US, UK, and Australian hit singles charts in the 1960s – click here to open the PDF – as a subset of the Canadian Hit Singles Chart (coming soon).

The Canadian music industry through much of the 1960s was simply treated as a US branch plant. The quality of the recording studios, availability of skilled musicians and technicians, and radio support were all lacking.

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Music Radio Sixties

Play the Song – Backwards!

By Snjihcs Nehpets

The novelty effect of working with tape in the 1950s and 60s occasionally made it on record; tape could be sped up (e.g. The Chipmunks), slowed down, or run backwards for extra effect (e.g. The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” or Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle”). Of course, running the tape backwards might yield an unlistenable mess of gibberish, or it could create a surprisingly melodic new tune. But rarely did a whole “backwards” song get released. 

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