On This Day: November 3, 1990 — The Righteous Brothers Hit #1 With Unchained Melody

Nobody at Philles Records expected “Unchained Melody” to sell a single copy in 1965. It was recorded in an afternoon, slapped on the flip side of “Hung on You,” and left off the track listing that mattered to the label. The original still managed a respectable number 14 on the UK chart that August, spending 12 weeks in the lower half of the top 20 before fading out like any other B-side. Twenty-five years and one ghost story later, it knocked Britain’s actual number one off the top of the chart and refused to leave for a month.

A B-Side Nobody Was Supposed to Notice

Bobby Hatfield and Bill Medley recorded “Unchained Melody” on March 2, 1965, at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, for their album Just Once in My Life. The pair split solo spotlights on each record, and according to Medley, the two of them settled who got this one with a coin toss. Hatfield won, and sang lead alone — Medley’s only contribution was Wurlitzer piano.

Phil Spector, who produced the duo’s actual singles, didn’t bother with it. He treated the track as album filler and let Medley produce it instead, since it wasn’t worth his time. When “Hung on You” came out as the A-side that July, DJs flipped the record and played “Unchained Melody” on air instead — a decision that reportedly furious Spector, who later claimed production credit on the song anyway once it started selling. Medley has joked since that if he’d known it would be a hit, he’d have hired a better piano player than himself.

The detail that made the record is barely audible until you’re listening for it: the soaring “I need your love” in the final verse wasn’t in the arrangement. Hatfield asked for another take after the session wrapped, just to push that line higher, and that edit became the moment every cover version since has tried to copy.

Phil Spector in the studio, 1965 — he didn’t produce “Unchained Melody,” but claimed credit once it became a hit anyway.

How a Pottery Wheel Brought a 25-Year-Old Record Back

The song sat quietly on oldies radio for two and a half decades until director Jerry Zucker needed music for a scene he hadn’t originally planned to shoot. Demi Moore had been taking pottery classes to look convincing as her character Molly, and when she showed Patrick Swayze what she’d learned, the two of them ended up at the wheel together. Zucker built a scene around it, set it at 2 a.m. in a New York loft, and put “Unchained Melody” underneath the whole thing. The goal was to keep it PG-13 — all desire, conveyed through eye contact, no skin.

Ghost opened in July 1990 and became the highest-grossing film in the world that year. Demi Moore still has the pots from that scene — she’s called them “the saddest looking things,” but she kept them anyway.

What made the placement work wasn’t just the scene — it was that the studio didn’t commission a new song for the moment and bury the old one on a soundtrack album nobody bought. Zucker built the scene around a record that already existed, let the needle drop do the emotional work, and left the original pressing to find its own way back onto radio. That’s a cheaper, riskier move than hiring a composer, and it only pays off if the song was strong enough to survive 25 years in a box. This one was.

Director Jerry Zucker — he built the pottery scene around Moore’s real pottery classes, then scored it with a 25-year-old B-side.

Ghost (1990) — the film that sent a 25-year-old B-side back up the charts.

Britain Puts a 1965 Record Back at Number One

Verve Forecast reissued the 1965 original in the UK that autumn, licensed through Polygram. According to the Official Charts Company, the single entered the UK chart on October 27, 1990, and climbed to number one the very next week — the chart dated November 3, 1990. It held the top spot for four weeks straight, ran a total of 14 weeks on the chart, and finished the year as the UK’s best-selling single of 1990, a record it holds against every other song released that year, including fresher competition from artists actively promoting new material.

That’s the part that still surprises people who weren’t there: in a year that also produced major UK number ones from Whitney Houston and other chart heavyweights of the era, the single that outsold everything was a song older than most of the people buying it, pulled off a B-side nobody had marketed in a generation. It beat genuinely new music the same way George Michael’s Faith had beaten the competition a few years earlier — on the strength of the song itself, not a promotional push.

The US saw a stranger version of the same story. Two different recordings of “Unchained Melody” charted on the Hot 100 simultaneously that year — the original 1965 take, reissued by Verve Forecast, and a brand new re-recording Medley and Hatfield cut for Curb Records once they realized the licensing on the original was tangled up. For eight straight weeks, the Righteous Brothers had two different versions of the same song sitting in the Billboard top 20 at once, a feat nobody else had managed with a single song before.

The 1990 UK reissue sleeve — the record that outsold every new release of the year.

The Only Song to Hit Number One Four Different Times

“Unchained Melody” has done something no other song managed until 2014: four separate recordings of it have each reached number one on the UK chart, by four completely different acts. Jimmy Young got there first in 1955, with a version that held the top spot for three weeks. The Righteous Brothers followed 35 years later. Then, in 1995, two actors from the army drama Soldier Soldier did it again, almost by accident.

Robson Green and Jerome Flynn played soldiers Dave Tucker and Paddy Garvey on the show, and when the entertainment booked for an on-screen wedding scene failed to turn up, the writers had the two characters perform “Unchained Melody” themselves as an impromptu duo, half-jokingly billed as “The Unrighteous Brothers.” Viewers wanted the single. Robson & Jerome’s version spent seven weeks at number one, sold more than 1.8 million copies, and became 1995’s best-selling UK single — beating even the Righteous Brothers’ own 1990 total.

Gareth Gates made it four for four in 2002. He’d just finished as runner-up to Will Young on the first series of Pop Idol, and his “Unchained Melody” cover became his debut single, going straight to number one for four weeks and selling over 1.3 million copies. Every one of these versions used the same Alex North melody and Hy Zaret lyric, written originally in 1955 for a forgotten prison drama called Unchained — a movie nobody remembers, attached forever to a song nobody can escape.

Robson Green and Jerome Flynn — two actors who out-sold the Righteous Brothers with the same song five years later.

Gareth Gates made it four different acts, four different number ones, same song.

What Happened to Hatfield and Medley

Bobby Hatfield died in 2003, found unresponsive in his hotel room before a scheduled performance — he was 63. Bill Medley kept performing the Righteous Brothers catalog afterward, often with a video tribute to Hatfield worked into the live show. Medley is still touring arenas and casinos, singing the low harmony to a recording of the voice that made the record famous in the first place.

The honest read on all this: “Unchained Melody” didn’t become a standard because any one version was definitive. It became one because the song itself is nearly foolproof, and every few years some new context — a wedding, a film, a talent show — hands it to a fresh audience who has no idea it’s already been number one three times before. That’s a rarer kind of hit than a well-promoted single. Nobody marketed this song into immortality; audiences kept doing it themselves, unprompted, once a generation.

Compare that to how most catalog songs actually resurface — a licensed sync placement, a TikTok trend, a deliberate anniversary reissue push from a label trying to squeeze one more quarter out of a back catalog. “Unchained Melody” has gone through all of those paths at different points and kept climbing regardless, which is a different thing entirely from a song that only works because someone paid to put it back in front of people.

It’s a pattern the UK chart has seen before. a-ha’s “Take On Me” needed three separate release attempts before it caught on anywhere — proof that a chart-topper and an instant hit aren’t always the same thing.

Bill Medley, still performing the Righteous Brothers catalog decades after Hatfield’s death.

Sources

• Official Charts Company — Unchained Melody (1990) chart history — entry date, peak position, and weeks on chart for the 1990 reissue.
• Wikipedia — Unchained Melody — full recording and chart history across all four UK number-one versions.
• Songfacts — Unchained Melody by The Righteous Brothers — background on the 1965 recording session and Phil Spector’s limited role.