4 July 1991
Before we start laughing at the Brits for making this, at 16 weeks, their longest-running consecutive number one ever, keep in mind that it spent ten weeks at the top of the Irish charts before returning to number one a month later for one more week. People of Ireland: you have disgraced yourself again.
Power ballads and movie soundtrack songs had gone to number one before, and Bryan Adams already had an Irish fanbase, but nothing to this extent. That said, those 16 weeks at number one in the UK were off relatively low and steady sales figures: 1.85 million in total, where four years later Robson and Jerome’s ‘Unchained Melody’ sold 1.87 million UK singles off just seven weeks at number one. This suggests that ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ was less a blazing pop-cultural comet than a persistent simmering presence, which is how I remember it here in Ireland too.
The song itself also shows that sort of excitement-free steadiness. It’s a dour, dumbed-down soft-rock power ballad: no cliche left unused, no snare hit left un-echoed. You couldn’t call its chorus catchy or hooky; it just resolves itself. What strikes me most is, despite the grand talk of fighting and dying for you, how all this everything-doing is such a lumpen, joyless trudge. That churning, repetitive middle section of “There’s no love / like your love / and no other / could give more love” is fairly representative of the dull, tired, double-denim work being turned in here.
Why was this single the one to break all records? Maybe it was simply the first to combine the long-standing pull of power balladry with a newer strategic push of movie marketing. The rest of the ’90s will see plenty of these mega-selling, long-loitering movie theme romantic power ballads, some of which go on to more ubiquity and infamy than others. (Happily for me, the one which achieved the most notoriety as a UK number one is kept off the Irish chart summit by a different sort of mega-chart-topper.) Bryan Adams himself tries it again regularly during the decade, topping our charts again with ‘All For Love’, basically a rehash of ‘Everything I Do (I Do It For You)’ with Three Musketeers instead of one Robin Hood.
The video for ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ that we remember, featuring clips from Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, isn’t available on Bryan Adams’ YouTube channel or anywhere else I looked. Instead, there’s this alternative video using concert footage. So, as well as the movie and the single, there was the concert experience. I wonder if that also lasted countless weeks or merely felt like it.
