Zager & Evans – In The Year 2525 (Exordium And Terminus)

7th August 1969 · 1960s, 1969, Music

Another one-hit wonder from the summer of ’69 by Zager & Evans, the still-prescient In The Year 2525 topped the charts and sold a staggering four million copies.

One of the great pleasures of delving back into the past for childhood music is the serendipitous discovery of songs I’d forgotten – yet, upon rediscovery, the first notes bring memories flooding back.

One of those is this tune – another one-hit wonder – which immediately reminds me of the first moon landing in the Summer of ’69, much more so than the event itself, which was just a bunch of blurry black-and-white images on a small telly surrounded by excited grown-ups.

With its apocalyptic tone and enjoyably clunky key changes as time moves ominously forward in 1,010 year increments towards the extinction of all life on earth, it’s oddly timeless. Or, perhaps, timely.

It’s also the only song to top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic by artists who never had another hit of any kind; in fact Danny Zager and Richard Evans ended their association little over a year later.

And I never knew ’til now that their song had a Latin subtitle (Exordium & Terminus).