'Emerald City' - The Seekers Lost Christmas Song

I am in the process of trying to update my (fairly) comprehensive list of all U.K. Christmas hit singles and as such have been trawling the Internet for information. Ironically, I discovered 'Emerald City' by The Seekers (no 50 - 1967) by going through my own collection of CD's as part of my drive to whittle down what I have to make room for some of the CD's I was left by my mate, Alan.

Listening to bits of the CD's you are thinking of getting rid of is usually fatal as, when you actually hear most of them again, you find that you don't want to get rid of them at all! On this occasion, however, the compilation of The Seekers I was playing was water damaged and so I had already decided to get rid of it and was just making sure there weren't any individual songs I wanted to keep on the computer.

As soon as I heard, 'Emerald City' I thought it sounded like a Christmas single and so I checked it out on the internet. According to Official charts.com the song got to no 50 for 1 week in Dec 1967 as so also qualifies for inclusion in the unfortunate list of songs to reach the lowest available chart position for just the single week. Thankfully, The Seekers had plenty of other bigger hits so they do not join acts like Angel Witch, who's 'Sweet Danger' single was their only hit and reached no 75 for one week (there was only 50 official chart placings available in 1967).

According to Wikkipedia, 'Emerald City' was written by Kim Fowley (a real 60's 'character!) and another of the band members, Keith Potger under the nom-de-plume of 'John Martin' and is a song based upon a fictional visit to the Emerald City in L.Frank Baum's book, 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'. Quite why Fowley and Potger thought that a song about the Wizard of Oz would sell at Christmas time I'm not sure?

Still, I have to say that the song does evoke the 'magic feel' of Christmas time and does feature some VERY cute kids voices in the background so I'm a bit surprised that it did not do better than it did. Mind you, 1967 does not seem to have been a very 'festive' year for some reason? Until discovering, 'Emerald City' I had not found one single Christmas chart hit for that year in the U.K...

Take a watch of the video here and see what you think? Since discovering the song I have been playing it quite a bit! In fact, finding something that I missed before is what has inspired me to do some more research into U.K. Christmas hits and I hope to post an updated list here soon...

Merry Christmas pop pickers!