Mary Hopkin: "Those Were the Days"

October 28, 1968 (2 weeks)

1968's pop legacy — for good or bad — is considerable. Between the apogee of bubblegum, the rise of soft rock and the earliest glimmers of metal, this has been a year with lots to answer for. Most egregious of all, however, might be the stretching of pop's time limits. While Bob Dylan's groundbreaking smash "Like a Rolling Stone" took the classic two-minute hit and pounded it into submission, it was an exception. Singles of around three minutes were becoming more common but few dared to go much further.

Then, along came "MacArthur Park" and "Hey Jude" and the economy of time vanished. Not unlike "Rolling Stone" before it, pop stars didn't exactly rush to put out seven minute behemoths of their own but the four and five minute singles that would come along often committed far greater sins. While "MacArthur Park" had been the stitching together of several shorter pieces and "Hey Jude" was a near even split of its song and coda, singles that would have been perfectly positioned to clock in somewhere in the hundred and twenty to hundred and eighty second range were now happy to hammer the point home.

This is the major fault in "Those Were the Days": it's too bloody long. (As an aside, I don't know about you but if I was to do a song about nostalgia I might include something about how it was better back when pop songs were brief) In spite of a languid pace in the verses which doesn't do it any favours, Mary Hopkin manages to fit everything in within the two minute, twenty second mark when a second helping of "La-la-la-da-da-da" comes in. It seems like a good place to let it fade away. But then it keeps going with further chance encounters in a tavern and a creeping sense of loneliness. A jug band joins her (and, possibly, a small choir) another minute or so later and, all right, this has got to be where it wraps up, right? Nope, there's still plenty more to go. I'd describe it in further detail but it's bad enough there's one of us whose been busy hammering the point home.

What makes this excruciating exercise even worse is that Paul McCartney handled production on "Those Were the Days". The same individual who masterfully composed a novella in a tidy two minutes and change with "Eleanor Rigby" two years' earlier thought that Hopkin's debut single ought to stretch out to two-and-a-half times the length of one of his finest compositions. Somehow, the public didn't seem to mind, taking it to number one in both Canada and the UK, as well as number two on the Hot 100. The Mary Hopkin story of being discovered on British talent series Opportunity Knocks and then being signed by The Beatles' newfound Apple label was a cool rags-to-riches affair. Plus, she sounded great and looked really nice. There was a lot to like about her. A pity it wasn't follow-up hit "Goodbye", a Lennon-McCartney original which happened to be a much more manageable two-and-a-half minutes, that took her to the top of the charts instead. We won't be encountering Hopkin again in this space but at least she had her five minutes of fame which she managed to drag out as much as possible..

Score: 3