Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor Neil Sedaka, who died on Feb. 27 at age 86, by looking at his last of three No. 1 hits, the harder-edged “Bad Blood.”
By September 1975, Sedaka was, officially, back. He’d scored his second career No. 1 with the sweet pop ballad “Laughter in the Rain,” he’d hit the top 40 twice more with “The Immigrant” and “That’s When the Music Takes Me,” he’d performed a very well-received run of concerts at famed Los Angeles venue The Troubadour, and he’d even seen his 1973 song “Love Will Keep Us Together” become the biggest hit of ’75 in the hands of The Captain and Tennille. It was easily his most triumphant year in over a decade, since his first pop peak of 1962. But his own biggest hit was still yet to come: “Bad Blood,” with an assist by the man who helped him find his way back to the mainstream in the first place.
Elton John revived Sedaka’s stateside fortunes in the mid-’70s, after the two met at a Bee Gees concert in the early ’70s, while the former was becoming a superstar and the latter was in the midst of trying to revive his dormant career in the U.K. By the mid-’70s, Sedaka had successfully reintroduced himself to the British market, scoring a pair of top 20 hits, but still needed help finding his way back to U.S. shores. John, a longtime Sedaka fan, stepped in with his newly founded Rocket Records label to help facilitate. “It had been like Elvis coming up and giving us the chance to release his records,” he later recalled in an Elton-themed issue of the Story of Pop magazine series, about the fortuitous timing of the partnership. “We couldn’t believe our luck.”
The subsequently released Sedaka’s Back compilation of highlights from the three British albums released during the singer-songwriter’s U.K. sojourn was a major success, spawning the three aforementioned hits. But the radio run of “That’s When the Music Takes Me” was interrupted by another Sedaka song starting to get spins, one which wasn’t even released yet in the states: “Bad Blood” had been recorded for the winkingly titled Overnight Success album, released in the U.K. in early 1975, while America was still catching up to Sedaka’s Back. (It would released in the U.S. later in the year, with a slightly altered tracklist, as The Hungry Years.) But the song still caught the interest of stateside DJs, in large part due to the uncredited but unmistakable voice providing backing vocals throughout the track: Sir Elton himself.
By 1975, Elton John was the biggest pop star in the world. At the time “Bad Blood” caught heat that September, he’d already scored two Hot 100 No. 1 hits (“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “Philadelphia Freedom”) in that calendar year, as well as two Billboard 200 No. 1 albums in his Greatest Hits (which topped the chart for 10 weeks between the end of ’74 and beginning of ’75) and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy — the first album ever to debut atop the chart — and would best both listings once more before year’s end. He was perhaps the only singer-songwriter on either side of the Atlantic more scorching at that point than Sedaka himself, so it was unsurprising that discovery of a duet between the two ended up being a game-changer.
And John’s backing vocals on “Bad Blood” weren’t just a narrative selling point for the song, they were a crucial ingredient. The signature hook in the song is on the chorus, where Sedaka and John trade off the two-word title — “Bad!” / (“Baaaad!“) / “Blood!” / (“Blooood!“) — before coming together to sing the rest of the refrain in pitch-perfect harmony. John also pipes in to punctuate key moments of the verse (“Small change!“) and joins Sedaka for the entirety of the “Doo-ron, do-ron” bridge breakdown section. And John’s finest contribution to the effort might be how in the final two runs through the refrain, he jumps in a half-beat early the second time around the “Bad Blood” call-and-response, giving the song that little extra spice to make it unforgettable.
And it was already a pretty tasty gumbo to begin with. Beginning with that swampy, Dr. John-style electric piano rumble — played, remarkably enough, by future leading pop balladeer David Foster — leading into a slowed down Bo Diddley shuffle, the song was immediately a totally new sound for Sedaka, albeit one in keeping with a lot of the dominant sounds of the mid-’70s, including from his pack-leading label boss. The song’s slow lurch gives it a kind of molasses stickiness, and its New Orleans vibes pair nicely with the witchy-woman bent of the lyrics. Meanwhile, the presence of Jackie Kelso and Jim Horn on woodwinds — the latter having previously provided the sax solo on “Laughter in the Rain” — gives the groove a much-needed touch of lightness, preventing it from getting too stuck in the muck.
The lyric itself is not a particularly special one — “Just a pop song about an evil woman,” Sedaka described it to Billboard later in the year — but its rougher, more spiteful energy, including a use of the word “b–ch” on the chorus, helped toughen up and modernize the image of a performer who would still refer to himself as “Uncle Neil” during performances. (“It got me into another following, not the goodie two shoes crowd,” Sedaka recalled to Billboard at year’s end.) For his part, co-writer Phillip Cody wishes he could’ve gotten a do-over on the lyric, but that Sedaka and John started up in the studio before he got a chance to re-write it. “I didn’t like it, and I thought, ‘Okay, what are we doing next?,'” he recalled to Songfacts in 2011. “And I just moved on. I thought, ‘That’s probably going nowhere.’ And I was absolutely wrong.”
BillboardIndeed, “Bad Blood” was a smash right out of the gate, debuting at No. 66 on the Hot 100 in September and topping the chart dated Oct. 11, 1975, a mere four weeks later. It knocked out David Bowie’s “Fame” — another hard-grooving rocker with a legendary backing vocalist — and lasted for three weeks at No. 1, becoming the longest-reigning and also best-selling smash of Sedaka’s entire career. (Sedaka was also proud that unlike his first two hits of 1975, “Bad Blood” didn’t hit No. 1 on what was then Billboard‘s Easy Listening chart, now known as Adult Contemporary.) The song was then deposed by — who else? — Elton John, topping the Hot 100 for the third and final time of 1975 (as a credited artist, anyway) with his Rock of the Westies lead single “Island Girl.”
But while Sir Elton would score another Hot 100 No. 1 the very next year — and then another one in the ’80s, and a couple more in the ’90s — “Bad Blood” would mark Sedaka’s final visit to pole position. He did earn one more top 10 hit off The Hungry Years in 1976, with his ballad re-recording of signature ’60s hit (and first Hot 100-topper) “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” But “Love in the Shadows,” lead single from follow-up album Steppin’ Out, only got as high as No. 16, and even bringing John back for another backing vocal on the album’s title track couldn’t get it higher than No. 36. Sedaka left Rocket a year later to sign with Elektra, but as disco and then new wave took over top 40, he was once again left behind by the mainstream — notching only one more top 40 hit in his career, alongside daughter Dara on the No. 19 hit “Should’ve Never Let You Go” in 1980.
Still, “Bad Blood” stands today as the peak of Sedaka’s improbable comeback year, where he shook off an entire decade of stateside obscurity to not only find himself back on the inside of pop music, but bigger than ever, and a close associate and duet partner with the decade-younger superstar who was at its very center. And while the song has not inspired a ton of covers or samples over the decades, it did lend its title to another No. 1 a full 40 years later — this one by Taylor Swift, getting an assist from Kendrick Lamar, and capping an imperial chart year of her own.
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