However, UK record buyers couldn’t be convinced that subsequent singles based on works by Rossini (‘Apple Knocker’) and Grieg (‘Dawn Cracker’) were such a hot idea. Producer/hustler Kim Fowley had acquired the copyright to an arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s ‘March Of The Toy Soldiers’, from The Nutcracker – subsequently rendered irresistible with a barrelhouse piano and a raucous, rocking beat.
In an open season for instrumentals, the house band at LA’s Rendezvous Records also went to No.1 in the UK in 1962, under the name B Bumble And The Stingers, with ‘Nut Rocker’. Again, The Tornados eked out a handful of other Top 40 appearances in their native UK, but their chart presence in the US was a one-shot affair: Joe Meek’s cavernous, awestruck production rode a wave of into-the-unknown excitement as the space race gathered momentum. Secondly, the satellite-besotted ‘Telstar’ by The Tornados mapped a fittingly stratospheric trajectory to the top both in the UK and the US, in October and December 1962, respectively. (The song went to No.2 in Britain, where the avuncular and well-loved Bilk notched up several more hits.) Astronaut Eugene Cernan even included the song on a cassette compilation which he took into space on Apollo 10 in 1969. Firstly, the lachrymose ‘Stranger On The Shore’, by trad-jazz clarinetist Acker Bilk, topped the US charts in May 1962, tapping into a surprisingly broad vein of sentimental introspection. It’s generally accepted that UK artists were usually non-starters in the US before The Beatles kindled a sometimes indiscriminate obsession with all things British – but, though many British artists couldn’t even hope to become one-hit wonders during this period, two US No.1 instrumentals by Brits came along in the same year, well before the dawn of Beatlemania. Their moments in the sun captured the public’s fleeting infatuations more acutely than songs with a theoretically worthier place in the pantheon, and pop music history is now scattered with one-hit wonders in all shapes and sizes. But many artists just happened to be at the right place at the right time – whether by accident or design – with a sole UK or US hit which took them all the way to No.1. Even the most opportunistic milkers of momentary fads would rather eke out as much mileage as circumstances, and the record-buying public’s patience, will allow. No one ever sets out to be a one-hit wonder.
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