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Unless Adele has a new album that she’s not telling anyone about, it’s very likely Britain’s biggest-selling album of 2018 will be songs from a Hollywood musical about a 19th-century circus impresario. The Greatest Showman soundtrack, a potent bit of feel-good razzmatazz based on the life of PT Barnum, equalled Adele’s record of eleven consecutive weeks at No1 back in March and has since refused to go away. Its rival chart-toppers have been treated like rodents in a game of whack-a-mole. Up they pop for a single week – George Ezra, Kylie, Arctic Monkeys, Post Malone – before getting thumped back into their holes by The Greatest Showman. Barnum is credited with saying, “Always leave them wanting more,” but this show has run and run.
This is quite a twist. The last movie soundtrack to dominate its year was Saturday Night Fever in 1978, and that was a package of disco hits. To find an equivalently huge set of show tunes you’d have to go back to The Sound Of Music, the Thriller of the Sixties. Every year between 1956 and 1969, Britain’s top seller was either a soundtrack or a Beatles album. The Americans were hipper – in 1968, they had Jimi Hendrix while we had The Sound Of Music again – but in Britain the Beatles stood alone. Until rock music found a mass adult audience, starting with Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, the musical was popular music’s generation-straddling goliath. Might that be happening again?
It should be said that The Greatest Showman is no archaic throwback. Composed by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the millennial duo who won an Oscar for La La Land’s “City Of Stars”, the soundtrack is a canny fusion of Broadway conventions and 21st-century pop. “The Greatest Show” has the hysterical will-to-power of mid-period Kanye West, “This Is Me” features the walloping drums and lusty chants associated with Jack Antonoff’s productions, and “Come Alive” is the kind of flamboyantly charismatic smash that Robbie Williams can’t write any more. But the craftsmanship – the juicy density of melody, narrative and rhyme – is distinctly Broadway. Pasek, Paul and producer Greg Wells have hit upon a magic formula that takes The Greatest Showman close to the El Dorado of universal appeal.
“I think the film’s banal but wholesome message of self-determination taps into a real need for something totally innocent,” says Guardian film critic Caspar Salmon. “But it wouldn’t have done anything without those earworm songs. Families are going to see the film together. It’s managed to hook Broadway nuts and Adele fans. You can enjoy the torchy aspects if you’re older, but fall for the modern production if you’re younger.”
The soundtrack’s cross-format success bears this out. Now triple platinum, The Greatest Showman’s 900,000 sales are unusually evenly divided between physical, digital downloads and streams, with five tracks breaking the Top 40. “It’s almost unprecedented that Pasek and Paul’s songs are this resonant out of the box,” says Ben Cook, president of Atlantic Records UK. “There was some expectation, but this is a runaway success story now and it’s always hard to predict those.”
Hollywood and Broadway have been annexing pop’s territory for a while now. The Frozen soundtrack and the original cast recording of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton are two of the decade’s biggest musical phenomena, surprising even their creators. Disney hedged its bets by getting Demi Lovato to re-record Frozen’s eff-it-all anthem “Let It Go”, but Idina Menzel’s more traditional version outperformed it four times over. Similarly, Keala Settle’s original recording of “This Is Me” from The Greatest Showman, heavily promoted by Atlantic’s UK team, was a hit, while Kesha’s pop remake flopped.
For years, Broadway roots were something to hide, lest they spook the pop audience, but now they’re often the main attraction. “The Greatest Showman and Hamilton are both re-energising the genre in different ways,” says Ben Cook. “Clearly there’s going to be a lot of interest and investment in similar projects, but it’s very difficult to dissect the secret sauce that’s made this so phenomenal.” Caspar Salmon agrees: “There was a time when the film seemed like a whopping flop in the making. You can’t bank on the sort of word-of-mouth success that it’s had.”
Movies are a powerful gateway into pop music. My seven-year-old daughter has fallen for Stevie Wonder and Elton John songs via the soundtrack to Sing and knows Justin Timberlake as the guy from Trolls. Soundtracks such as these and Moana are the albums that give us common ground as a family. In live music, meanwhile, the film composer Hans Zimmer is now an arena headliner and even tribute shows to absent maestros such as John Williams play to packed houses. This year, dozens of sing-a-long outdoor screenings of The Greatest Showman are creating an environment where cinema meets gig. Again, it’s the sound of the movies that brings young and old together.
That’s an experience you can no longer find on Top 40 radio. Streaming has blown the generation gap wide open, turning the Top 40 into a Logan’s Run scenario: as a listener, if you’re over 30, you’re dead. Take Post Malone, the MC whose Beerbongs & Bentleys is the only album to top the US charts this year for as long as Black Panther (another, very different example of the soundtrack’s commercial revival). Starting out as a goofy party rapper, Malone has fared even better as a zonked-out rock-rap buzzkill who makes songs called “Paranoid” and “Rich & Sad”. Younger listeners lap him up, but he’s the musical equivalent of a sign on a bedroom door reading, “Parents Keep Out!”
Unifying hits still exist, such as Ed Sheeran’s sturdily old-fashioned ballad “Perfect”, but they’re getting rarer. The album chart, where CD buyers still have enormous clout, is where different generations continue to interact. Usually they’re brushing past each other without a glance – here comes Cardi B, there goes Roger Daltrey – but occasionally they find something they can agree on. For now, that happens to be Hugh Jackman in a top hat singing, “It’s everything you ever want/It’s everything you ever need.” He may be on to something.
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