Darl Messy
There is a very short list of songs that change a room within two seconds of starting, and Neil Diamond wrote one of them in 1969. Whether it is a stadium, a wedding or a pub at closing time, the sequence is almost always identical. Here are twenty things that happen the second it begins.
1. Every head in the room comes up
Recognition is immediate and total. There is no gradual dawning, no checking with the person next to you. The opening is distinctive enough that a room of several thousand people identifies it simultaneously, which is a rare property for any piece of music.
2. Conversations stop mid-sentence
People who were talking simply stop talking. Not out of respect for the music but because they are about to be required to participate, and everyone knows it. The song functions as an announcement that something collective is starting.
3. Everyone stands without being asked
No screen instruction, no prompt from a compère. A room stands up because it has done this before and knows what comes next. That reflex has been trained into audiences over roughly fifty years of repetition.
4. Drinks get put down
Hands are about to be needed. It is a small, entirely unconscious piece of choreography that happens in venues all over the world, and once you notice it you cannot stop noticing it.
5. People who claim to dislike the song join in anyway
There is always someone who has publicly stated they find it overplayed. They sing it. Resistance to this particular song has a very poor success rate, largely because refusing to participate is more conspicuous than participating.
6. Strangers turn to face each other
This is the part that makes it unusual. The singing is not aimed at a stage or a screen. People turn towards whoever is beside them, which is behaviour you almost never see triggered by a recording.
7. The volume in the room doubles
A crowd that was making ordinary background noise suddenly becomes the loudest thing present, frequently louder than the sound system. In a stadium the effect is genuinely startling if you are not expecting it.
8. Arms go up and stay up
Not the polite single-arm sway of most singalongs. Both arms, held up, for an extended period, by people who would find that embarrassing in almost any other context.
9. Nobody worries about being in tune
The song actively rewards imprecision. A crowd singing slightly flat, slightly late and considerably too loud sounds better rather than worse, because volume and commitment are the entire point.
10. The gap gets filled instantly
Diamond built a deliberate space into the composition for an audience to answer back. It is a structural decision made in 1969, and it is the single reason this song works in a stadium where hundreds of better-known records do not.
11. People who do not know the verses still nail the chorus
You do not need to know the whole song to take part, which is why participation is close to universal. Most people singing it could not tell you what the second verse is about, and it does not matter at all.
12. Someone starts the response too early
Every time. Enthusiasm outpaces timing, the crowd corrects itself within a beat, and nobody minds. It is now practically part of the arrangement.
13. Phones come out
A significant portion of the room films it, which means the song generates its own promotional material continuously, for free, in venues worldwide, several times a night.
14. Whoever is on stage stops working
If there is a performer present, they usually stop singing and let the room take it. The best thing anyone on a stage can do with this song is get out of the way of it.
15. Age stops mattering entirely
Nineteen-year-olds and seventy-year-olds do exactly the same thing at exactly the same moment. Very little else in popular culture produces identical behaviour across that age range.
16. Nobody checks what year it came out
A song from 1969 is being sung by people born decades after it, with no sense that they are participating in a period piece. Diamond avoided the production fashions that date records, and this is the dividend.
17. It becomes about the room, not the record
Within seconds the actual recording is incidental. What is happening is a group activity that happens to have a composer, and most participants are not thinking about him at all.
18. The ending gets extended
Rooms are reluctant to let it finish. Repeats, extra rounds, an a cappella final pass with no music at all — the song frequently outlasts its own running time.
19. People feel obliged to explain themselves afterwards
There is often a slightly sheepish moment once it stops, particularly from people who had been insisting they were too cool for it. The sheepishness is part of the ritual.
20. Somebody in the room genuinely means it
Underneath the ritual and the repetition, it is a song about feeling good in company, committed to entirely without irony. On any given night, for at least one person in that room, that lands properly.
The bottom line: Diamond wrote a pop single in 1969 and ended up with a piece of communal custom. He retired from touring in 2018 after a Parkinson’s diagnosis, and the song has carried on entirely without him, several times a night, all over the world.
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