Music lovers are just figuring out the heartbreaking meaning behind East 17's Christmas hit, Stay Another Day.
The pop band, which formed in 1991, made it to number one in the charts with their festive tune in 1994 though few seem to know the origin behind the song. Stay Another Day spent five weeks at the top of the charts and was later nominated at the Brit Awards for Best British Single.
While East 17's effort was pipped by the Phil Daniels-featuring Blur song, Parklife, fans of the seasonal classic are discovering the darker side of Stay Another Day. A campaign has since started to get the Tony Mortimer-written song to number one for the second time this Christmas.
The third single from their second album, Steam, East 17's song may be associated with the most wonderful time of the year but its lyrics are steeped in tragedy. Mortimer has since revealed the song was inspired by the death of his brother, Ollie, by suicide.
Mortimer, who won an Ivor Novello award for Songwriter of the Year for his work on Stay Another Day, revealed the tragic origins of the song back in 2016. Speaking to Songwriting Magazine, he said: "I had the melody and the chords and I was looking for a story to go on top of it.
"It was based on my brother’s suicide and losing someone. What would you do if you had one more day with a loved one? Over time I started to put together the story and I wrote it in a different way to any song I’d written before. It’s a different way of writing because they were just sections of statements, rather than a verse being a story from beginning to end."
Stay Another Day marked the band's first ballad and their biggest hit. Mortimer added the song was based on "conversations I'd had with my brother" before his death and while he intended the song to be "ambiguous," it remains a "love song about the end of a relationship."
Mortimer added: "It was a bit of a risk as I didn’t know how well it was going to go down, but I wanted the lines to mean something to everyone. Yes, there’s my story in there but, more importantly, I wanted it to reach people. Once people connect with a line in a song, that’s what makes a hit."
East 17 are now celebrating 30 years since the track first released and launched a campaign to get the song to number one on the charts. Mortimer, speaking to the Independent, added: "We were batting around ideas, talking about a reunion and something big. And I said: 'I don’t just want to release the single and be on the take. That’s not right.' So I’ve stopped them just releasing it [for money] – and I feel good about that."
English (US) ·