THE HIT HAMMER: Barry Manilow's "Mandy"

(The Hit Hammer is where I'm reviewing each #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100. Starting from when the chart started in 1958 and eventually working my way to the present. To see my inspiration and more information about this blog, please CLICK HERE)

Barry Manilow - "Mandy"

Hit Number 1: January 18, 1975

Stay at Number 1: 1 Week

When songs disappear from the Hot 100, they obviously don't disappear entirely from existence. Especially just three years after a song's Hot 100 appearance, it still remains as a pretty popular song. This is why when Barry Manilow released the song "Mandy", he had to rename the song from its original title, "Brandy". In 1972, Looking Glass made it to #1 with the all-time banger "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)", and that song continued to be played in radio rotation for all of the '70s, I would assume. So Manilow figured he would cause a lot of confusion if he recorded another song with the same title, and he switched it to "Mandy". Though Manilow's version is the most successful one, his version is just a cover of many other versions of the song which still had the "Brandy" title attached to it.

The original version of "Mandy" came from a singer named Scott English, who admittedly made more of a career out of songwriting rather than singing. "Brandy" or "Mandy" is his biggest contribution to the charts, and in America that's not saying a whole lot considering his version only made it to #91 on the Hot 100. (It fared better in his native England though, peaking at #12 there) Though English's career doesn't offer much to write home about, his song "Brandy" peaked the interest of a lot of budding musicians, and they chose his song to cover as their own. Barry Manilow was obviously not a budding musician. He was a full on bloomer for a while at this point, but he still hadn't made any major dents into the Hot 100. That was until "Mandy" of course. The legendary Clive Davis is the one who suggested to Manilow to record the song. Manilow was the one who made the call to change the name, but he agreed to record the song. Musicians at that time knew that if Clive Davis told you to do something, you did it. The guy knew what he was doing.

"Mandy" is the kind of song that was right up Manilow's alley. He loved recording songs that were grand, orchestrated love ballads, and that's the kind of production we hear on "Mandy". The usual "Manilow approach," however, were love ballads that dealt with lingering sadness about a lost love, but still finding reasons to be optimistic about the future. (Seriously, a lot of Manilow songs are that way) "Mandy" is still very much a sad song. The song is about a guy who's sad about his breakup with this Mandy girl, but where the usual Manilow songs have the narrator trying to be hopeful about life changing around, the narrator in "Mandy" is only sad. We're told that Mandy was everything the guy would have wanted in a girl, and she treated him well but he "sent her away." The song is a big lament about the narrator losing his love.

Unfortunately, Manilow doesn't have a ton of songs that excite me that much, but that's probably because I'm not a ballad guy. There's nothing bad about "Mandy"; Manilow has a grand and soothing singing voice, the orchestra swells up and explodes at the right times and as far as ballads go, the song has everything that you would want. But again, I'm not a ballad guy, so "Mandy" doesn't really do much for me. As far as I'm concerned, "Mandy" is just a generic #1 hit. But if you ask Manilow, I'm sure he would tell you that this song was a big deal in his life, seeing as it was his first #1 hit. He would make a career out of songs like this, and to his credit, this kind of thing worked for him. We'll hear from him again in this series.

GRADE: 5/10

IN POP CULTURE:

"Mandy" has been covered a lot of times, and in 2003, the boyband Westlife covered the song and released it as "Mandy", just like Manilow did. Their version did nothing in America but it did hit #1 in the U.K. Here's that cover:

(Westlife's highest-charting single, "Swear It Again", peaked at #20 in 2000. It's a 6)