Wet Wet Wet – Love Is All Around

Offered three songs to cover for a film soundtrack, a Scottish band passed on “I Will Survive” and a Barry Manilow ballad — and turned down their pick into a record that sat at No. 1 so long they eventually deleted it themselves to make it stop.

When writer-director Richard Curtis went looking for a song to carry his 1994 romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral, he handed Wet Wet Wet a choice of three covers: Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, Barry Manilow’s Can’t Smile Without You, or a gentle 1967 ballad by The Troggs. The Scottish band took the Troggs song. Marti Pellow’s reasoning was simple — they knew they could make it their own. That decision produced one of the most dominant chart runs in British pop history.

The song itself was already a quietly remarkable piece of writing. Troggs frontman Reg Presley — better known for the caveman stomp of Wild Thing — wrote Love Is All Around in roughly ten minutes, inspired by a television broadcast of the Salvation Army’s Joy Strings performing a number called “Love That’s All Around.” The Troggs’ original, produced by Larry Page and cut at Pye Studios in London, reached No. 5 in the UK in late 1967, a tender outlier in a catalog built mostly on garage-rock muscle.

Ten minutes to write, fifteen weeks to dislodge

Wet Wet Wet recorded their version in January 1994 and gave it a fuller, more luxuriant arrangement than the Troggs’ spare original — sweeping strings, a different introduction, and Pellow’s soaring lead vocal. Released on May 9, 1994, it reached No. 1 within a few weeks and then simply refused to leave. Powered by the runaway success of Four Weddings and a Funeral, the single stayed at the top of the UK Singles Chart for fifteen consecutive weeks, the second-longest unbroken run at No. 1 in the chart’s history at the time, bettered only by Bryan Adams’ (Everything I Do) I Do It for You.

It became inescapable to the point of irritation. By its peak the single was selling tens of thousands of copies a week, some radio stations had begun limiting it, and the band themselves grew weary of their own hit. Rather than chase Adams’ sixteen-week record, Wet Wet Wet made the rare decision to delete the single — pulling it from sale so that once shops sold through their stock, there would be no more. The fifteen-week reign ended on the band’s own terms, with Whigfield’s Saturday Night taking over the top spot.

The numbers around it are still staggering. Love Is All Around was the best-selling single in the UK in 1994 and has sold well over a million copies, ranking among the country’s all-time best sellers. It reached No. 41 in the United States, a modest showing that did nothing to dent its standing at home, where the fifteen-week run remains a record for a UK act to this day. Reg Presley, the man who dashed off the song in ten minutes, reportedly spent a chunk of his unexpected royalties funding research into crop circles.

The song’s reach outlived the moment. Richard Curtis returned to it for a comic payoff in his 2003 film Love Actually, where Bill Nighy’s washed-up rocker reworks it as a Christmas single. Presley died in 2013, the same year the track topped a VH1 poll of the greatest movie-soundtrack songs. What began as a band’s pragmatic pick from a list of three became, almost against everyone’s will, the sound of a British summer that refused to end.