The Intro

1978 was the year of Grease. Romantic leads John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John remained at number 1 for most of the summer with a song that was never in the original stage musical.

Before

The stage show had been created by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey and premiered in a Chicago, Illinois nightclub in 1971. It was set specifically in Chicago and based on Jacobs’s time at high-school there. Noticeably grittier than the later productions and film it spawned, there were a number of other differences. Most of the characters were Polish-American, Doug Stevenson played Danny Zuko and Leslie Goto was Sandy Dumbrowski. The T-Birds were known as the Burger Palace Boys. The only person from the cast of the original Grease to become famous was Marilu Henner, who played Marty. It had a much shorter running time, was shocking and had an almost entirely different soundtrack.

The team behind the musical made a deal to take the show to Off-Broadway in 1972. It became very popular and received seven Tony nominations. By the summer it was on Broadway itself, where it ran until 1980. Barry Bostwick played Danny and Carole Demas was Sandy. During the course of its run, several actors and actresses came and went, becoming famous and/or starring in the movie. Among the Dannys were Jeff Conaway (before becoming Kenickie) and Patrick Swayze. Richard Gere was Sonny and John Travolta was Doody. In 1973 Grease also started a UK run until 1974, featuring Gere, promoted to be Danny, and Stacey Gregg as Sandy. Paul Nicholas and Elaine Paige took over.

It was only a matter of time before someone decided to turn this musical into a movie. Robert Stigwood, manager of The Bee Gees and producer of Saturday Night Fever (1977), produced with Allan Carr, who had worked on Tommy (1975) and Saturday Night Fever. Randall Kleiser made his movie directing debut after being recommended by Travolta, one of the hottest talents of the era.

John Joseph Travolta was born 18 February 1954 in Englewood, New Jersey. His father was a Sicilian-American tire salesman and his mother an actress and singer. The Travolta children all wanted to follow in their mother’s footsteps. He dropped out of high school in 1971, aged 17 and moved to New York, where he landed the role of Doody. His first major role came in the horror Carrie in 1976 and that same year he had a Billboard top 10 hit with Let Her In. Landing the roll of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever turned him into a superstar and so he was a natural choice to star as Danny in Stigwood’s latest project (although apparently Happy Days star Henry Winkler had turned it down). As well as suggesting Kleiser as director, Travolta reckoned pop and country singer Olivia Newton-John would make a great Sandy.

Newton-John was born in Cambridge on 26 September 1948. Her Welsh father had been an MI5 officer and worked on the Enigma project in the Second World War. Her maternal grandmother was Jewish Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born and her third cousin is comedian Ben Elton. In 1954, when she was six, the family emigrated to Melbourne, Australia.

Newton-John’s singing career began at the age of 14 when she formed all-girl group Sol Four. She entered and won a talent contest on TV show Sing, Sing, Sing and won a trip to the UK. Although reluctant to go, her mother encouraged her and while here she recorded debut single Till You Say You’ll Be Mine in 1966. When friend and fellow singer Pat Carroll moved to the UK, they formed a duo but she turned solo once more when he returned to Australia.

Music mogul Don Kirshner briefly hired Newton-John to feature in short-lived girl group Toomorrow. From there she released her first solo album, If Not for You in 1971. The title track, written by Bob Dylan and recorded by George Harrison the year previous, was a big hit, peaking at seven in the UK. Follow-up Banks of the Ohio did one better and a cover of Harrison’s What Is Life climbed to 16 a year later. Newton-John’s version of Take Me Home, Country Roads went to 15 a year later.

In 1974 Newton-John entered the Eurovision Song Contest for the UK. She finished fourth with Long Live Love but it did respectably enough chart-wise, reaching 11. Later that year she scored her first US chart-topper with I Honestly Love You and her second with Have You Never Been Mellow in 1975. Despite this and scoring several Grammys too, there was a backlash in the States over a foreigner recording country music. Nonetheless, Newton-John left the UK to live over there. She returned to the UK singles chart in 1977 with the ballad Sam, peaking at six.

Following a dinner party at Helen Reddy’s home in which she met Carr, Newton-John was offered the role of female lead, renamed Sandy Ollson and was told they would make the character Australian to accommodate her accent. However she was initially reticent, fearing she was too old at 28 to be playing a high-school senior. It’s fair to say she probably doesn’t regret changing her mind in the end.

The scene in which Danny and Sandy are finally reconciled had until the film been soundtracked by a song called All Choked Up. It was in similar in theme to You’re the One That I Want but as the name suggests, much closer musically to an Elvis Presley pastiche. It was decided that one of Newton-John’s top songwriters and producers, John Farrar, who was a fellow Australian and had featured in The Shadows from 1973-76 would write two brand new songs for the movie. One was Hopelessly Devoted to You and the other, You’re the One That I Want.

Neither really fitted with the rest of the soundtrack which mostly evoked the spirit of 50s pop and rock’n’roll. The former was a country-tinged love song in more in keeping with Newton-John’s usual output. Kleiser was not fond of the latter. Fortunately, the rest of the world didn’t really agree with the film’s director.

Review

Me neither. I’m a self-professed hater of musicals. And yet, there are a few exceptions and this is probably the biggest one. It’s certainly the most famous. Like many of my age, I was first shown Grease as a child in the early 80s. I remember being enthralled from the opening bars of The Bee Gees-written theme tune sung by Frankie Valli when a friend down my street loaded his VHS copy (the Gibbs really were on fire back then). I also remember being really disappointed when the animation ended and an actual film began. The disappointment soon dissipated though.

I loved everything about Grease. I didn’t understand all the risqué jokes and sexual stuff going on but I was bowled over by the characters and music, like most people. And I also think I was chuffed that Danny and Sandy got together and even then, knew that there was something very exciting about Newton-John wearing the tightest clothes I’d probably seen at that point while purring ‘Feel your way’. Not thrilled with the perm, though.

The pure pop brilliance of You’re the One That I Want never dims despite decades of overexposure. It’s unlikely I’d ever put it on by choice but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it every time I hear it. Pure cheese of course, but the strutting verses are cool and the chorus ultra-catchy. It’s always hilarious to watch Travolta miming to those legendary opening lines sung by him like a cat in pain and ‘It’s electrifying’ will never not be funny. Unfortunately I can’t hear it without singing ‘Those new yoghurts you’re supplying, they’re electrifying!’ due to a 90s advert for St Ivel Shape. Weird how these things stick.

After

I’d assumed until now that You’re the One That I Want reigned supreme for almost the whole of the summer of 1978 because Grease was a box office smash and this marks the happy ending of the movie. Amazingly, Grease hadn’t even been released in the UK at this point. The US release came on 16 June, the day before it topped the chart in the UK. The British premiere came on 14 September. So for many, the clip from the film used to promote this single was their introduction to Grease. Which means you can take that mammoth nine-week run, the longest of the decade (equalled by Bohemian Rhapsody and Mull of Kintyre/Girls School) mostly as a sign of sheer love of the song.

However by this point the term ‘new wave’ was being coined to describe the alternative music scene that had risen from the ashes of punk. To the young music fans of acts like Blondie and The Police, the sight and sound of You’re the One That I Want on Top of the Pops throughout that summer must have become a huge annoyance. The Boomtown Rats proved the point to great effect later that year.

Travolta and Newton-John went number 1 across the globe with this first release from what was to become the highest-grossing musical of all time up to that point. It soon became prone to spoofs, from the likes of The Goodies and sadly Hylda Baker & Arthur Mullard. This ageing duo, both comic actors (the latter a horrible bastard), dressed up as Sandy and Danny and performed a truly dire version on Top of the Pops, which took them to 22 in the chart later in 1978.

The Outro

As I write this, You’re the One That I Want is ranked the fifth biggest-selling single of all time. It’s unlikely this will change. In 1990 it saw chart action once more thanks to The Grease Megamix. This amateurishly edited medley of You’re the One That I Want along with Greased Lightnin’ and Summer Nights peaked at three. It remained popular for years though – it was still getting played in my student union in the late-90s. To mark the 20th anniversary of the Grease film phenomenon, a dance version called You’re the One That I Want (Martian Remix) climbed to four in 1998. I have no recollection of this whatsoever. Nor do I remember the London cast recording by Craig McLachlan and Debbie Gibson which reached 13 in 1993.

The Info

Written & produced by

John Farrar

Weeks at number 1

9 (17 June-18 August)

Trivia

Births

20 June: Footballer Frank Lampard
22 June: Race car driver Dan Wheldon
30 June: Comedian Romesh Ranganathan
2 July: Actor Paul Danan
23 July: Footballer Stuart Elliott
31 July: Coldplay drummer Will Champion/Racing driver Justin Wilson

Deaths

23 July: Footballer Tommy McLaren
30 July: Scottish Labour MP John Mackintosh
31 July: Actor Carleton Hobbs
14 August: Writer Nicolas Bentley/Nuclear physicist Norman Feather

Meanwhile…

17 June: Media reports suggest a general election is on the cards in the autumn as the Labour minority government led by James Callaghan appears to be coming to an end. Only four months previous the Conservatives were 11 points ahead but it now looked like Labour would return with a majority.

19 June: Ian Botham becomes the first cricketer to score a century and take eight wickets in one innings of a Test match.

21 June: An outbreak of shooting at a Post Office depot in Belfast between Provisional IRA members and the British Army results in the deaths of one civilian and three IRA men.
Also on this day, the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical Evita opens at the Prince Edward Theatre in London. 

6 July: 11 people are killed when fire breaks out in a sleeping car train in Taunton, Somerset.

7 July: The Solomon Islands are annexed to the Crown and made independent from the UK. 

25 July: Louise Brown becomes the world’s first human to be born from in vitro fertilisation in Oldham, Greater Manchester.