Lulu – To Sir With Love

It was Billboard’s No. 1 single of the entire year in America — and in Britain, where it was made, it never charted at all.

The biggest American hit of 1967 was not “All You Need Is Love,” not “Light My Fire,” not anything by the Beatles, the Doors, or the Supremes. It was a film theme sung by a teenager from Glasgow — and in Britain, the country that made it, the song never charted at all. To Sir with Love spent five straight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and finished as Billboard’s year-end No. 1 single of 1967, while at home it sat unnoticed on the flip side of a modest hit. No record of its era had a stranger split between where it was born and where it was loved.

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The song exists because Lulu complained to a friend. Cast in James Clavell’s To Sir, with Love — her film debut, playing a pupil in Sidney Poitier’s East End classroom — she was dreading the material being proposed for her to sing, and asked Mark London, a Canadian composer from Montreal who happened to be married to her manager Marion Massey, to write something better. London doubted anyone would accept it, but Lulu insisted, and he produced the melody in five minutes. Lyricist Don Black added the words the next day, working in reverse of his usual method — words before music, one of the only times in his career he ever built a song that way. Lulu recalled being over the moon on hearing it: “I just knew it was going to be a great song.” Mickie Most produced the record, with the Mindbenders — who also appear in the film — backing her.

The B-side America flipped over

Then the business nearly buried it. In June 1967, Epic released Lulu’s cover of the Neil Diamond song The Boat That I Row as the American single, relegating To Sir with Love to the B-side — a decision that infuriated her. American disc jockeys quietly overruled the label. Drawn to the sweeping ballad on the flip, they played it enough to push it onto the Hot 100 in September, and on October 21, 1967, it reached No. 1, where it stayed for five consecutive weeks. It went gold, spent seventeen weeks on the chart, and when Billboard tallied the year, it stood at the very top — ahead of every British Invasion giant it had outsold. In Canada it ranked the No. 2 record of 1967, besting the Beatles’ All You Need Is Love. In the UK, meanwhile, it remained the B-side of Let’s Pretend, a No. 11 hit, and never charted under its own name. The Oscars compounded the oddity: America’s most popular song of the year was not even nominated for Best Original Song, a snub that reportedly left both Massey and Clavell furious.

The long thank-you

What the industry mishandled, audiences never let go of. The song’s subject — gratitude to a teacher who changed a life — gave it a permanence most chart-toppers never earn. Lulu sang it on The Ed Sullivan Show on October 22, 1967, the day after it reached No. 1, and it has been handed forward ever since: more than six hundred recorded covers, from Chaka Khan with the London Symphony Orchestra to Natalie Merchant and Michael Stipe, who performed it as a duet at Bill Clinton’s MTV inaugural ball in 1993. In January 2017, Saturday Night Live chose it as the song Cecily Strong sang beneath a portrait of President Obama as the show’s farewell to him — a fifty-year-old film theme, still the definitive way to thank someone for what they taught you. Black’s lyric even named Lulu’s own career retrospective, the 1994 compilation From Crayons to Perfume: The Best of Lulu.

The performance on this page comes from the official Phoenix Music International archive: Lulu live at the BBC on October 23, 1981, fourteen years and two days after the song first hit No. 1 in America. By then she was a veteran of Eurovision, her own television series, and a decade of reinvention — and the song had grown with her. The teenager thanking her teacher had become a woman thanking her past, and the ballad, as always, carried it.