There are summers you remember not for the weather or the news, but for a single song that seemed to pour out of every radio, every shop doorway, and every car window left open at a red light. The summer of 1994 was one of those summers in the United Kingdom, and the song responsible had roots that stretched back nearly thirty years before it became a movie-soundtrack phenomenon.

Most people who fell in love with it that year had no idea it had already lived a full life somewhere else entirely.

The song is “Love Is All Around” by Wet Wet Wet, released as part of the Four Weddings and a Funeral soundtrack in 1994 — but it was originally written and recorded by The Troggs back in 1967.

Reg Presley and the 1967 Original

The Troggs were not a band you would immediately associate with tender romantic ballads. By 1967 they had already made their name with raw, driving rock singles, and their sound was built for energy and urgency. But their frontman and primary songwriter, Reg Presley, had a softer side that occasionally surfaced in the catalog, and “Love Is All Around” was the clearest expression of it.

Presley wrote the song quickly — by some accounts in a matter of minutes — and the band recorded it with a directness that matched the era. The 1967 version clocks in at a lean, compact length. There is no padding, no extended instrumental break, and no dramatic swell designed to fill a cinema. It is a pop song in the truest sense: a concise declaration of feeling, delivered and done.

It reached the UK top ten upon release, making it one of the more successful singles of The Troggs’ career alongside their better-remembered raw rock material. In the United States it also charted respectably, adding to Presley’s reputation as a songwriter who could operate in more than one register. Over the years it was covered by other artists and licensed for various uses, but it never quite escaped the category of “that other Troggs song” — the gentler one that sat a little apart from their harder-edged identity.

That quiet underdog status was about to change completely.

Choosing the Song for the Film

When the British romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral was being assembled in the early 1990s, its producers and music supervisors were looking for a song that could carry the emotional weight of a key scene without overwhelming the storytelling. The film, written by Richard Curtis and starring Hugh Grant, was a low-budget production by Hollywood standards — but it had enormous charm and a genuine warmth that required its music to match.

The decision to use “Love Is All Around” and to commission a new version from the Glasgow-based band Wet Wet Wet turned out to be one of the defining soundtrack choices of the decade. Wet Wet Wet, fronted by vocalist Marti Pellow, had spent the late 1980s and early 1990s building a loyal following with polished, soulful pop. Their sound had softness and sincerity in equal measure — exactly what the song needed for its new context.

Reg Presley, as the songwriter, would benefit directly from the decision. He later became well known for spending a significant portion of his royalty earnings on research into unconventional scientific theories — a detail that made for a charming footnote in the story of the song’s windfall. But that financial story came later. First, there was the question of what Wet Wet Wet would actually do with the arrangement.

Expanding the Arrangement

The most striking difference between the 1967 original and the 1994 cover is not the melody — that remained largely faithful to Presley’s composition — but the space around it. Where The Troggs had recorded something compact and purposeful, Wet Wet Wet opened the song up into something that felt unhurried, patient, and built to breathe.

The production expanded the instrumental texture considerably. Strings were added to give the track warmth and cinematic reach. The tempo was softened just enough to allow Marti Pellow’s vocal more room to settle into each phrase. The overall effect was a song that felt less like a pop single being played at you and more like a memory gradually coming into focus.

This kind of arrangement transformation is not always successful. Many covers that attempt to expand a tight original end up simply making it longer without making it better. What worked in this case was that the expansion served the emotional arc of the lyric rather than decorating it. Every added layer supported the sense of feeling quietly overwhelmed by love — which was exactly what the film needed from the moment the song played over it.

The original Troggs recording was not erased by any of this. If anything, hearing both versions side by side makes the 1967 track sound even more impressive — a writer who knew what he had and did not over-explain it, and a later interpreter who understood exactly how much more space the song could hold.

Fifteen Weeks at Number One

When the Four Weddings and a Funeral soundtrack was released and the Wet Wet Wet single began climbing the UK charts in the spring and summer of 1994, few people predicted quite how long it would stay. Chart runs of that duration had become increasingly rare in the modern era of fragmented music consumption. But “Love Is All Around” held the UK number one position for fifteen consecutive weeks, a run that placed it among the longest-reigning singles in UK chart history.

For context, that fifteen-week stretch meant the song was at the top of the charts from early summer well into autumn. It outlasted promotional cycles, outlasted the film’s initial theatrical run, and outlasted the usual attention span of popular radio. People who had gone on holiday in June came back in September to find it still there.

The run was eventually ended when Wet Wet Wet themselves reportedly asked for the single to be withdrawn from sales — a decision that remains one of the more unusual footnotes in UK chart history. Whether driven by a sense that the song had run its natural course or by the band’s own mixed feelings about being defined entirely by a single track, it was a rare moment of an artist choosing to close a chapter rather than simply watching it fade.

The film itself became a significant moment in British cinema, helping to establish a template for the romantic comedy genre that would influence many productions throughout the rest of the decade and beyond. The song and the film became so intertwined in public memory that it is now difficult to think of one without the other — which is either a testament to perfect casting of a song in a scene, or simply the power of fifteen weeks of saturation, or both.

Why the Cover Defined 1994

Looking back from a distance of three decades, “Love Is All Around” by Wet Wet Wet holds its place as one of those recordings that captures something specific about its moment without being imprisoned by it. It does not sound dated in the way that many mid-1990s productions do. The strings have aged better than drum machines from the same era. Marti Pellow’s vocal has a quality that belongs more to timeless pop craft than to any particular trend.

Part of what gives the song its staying power is the same thing that made Reg Presley’s original endure for nearly three decades before Wet Wet Wet touched it: the lyric is simple in the best possible sense. It does not rely on clever wordplay or cultural reference. It says what it means with a directness that feels genuine rather than naive.

For older listeners who remember that summer — who heard the song drift out of a television set during the film, or on a car radio on the way somewhere, or in a pub on a warm evening — the recording carries that particular kind of emotional freight that has nothing to do with charts or soundtracks. It simply became part of a season in their lives and stayed there.

For listeners who came to it later, the journey from a 1967 rock band’s tender B-side moment to a 1994 cinematic phenomenon is its own kind of pleasure: a reminder that a good song does not expire. It waits. It finds its moment. And sometimes, the moment turns out to be much bigger than anyone involved could have imagined.

Reg Presley wrote “Love Is All Around” in a few minutes sometime in the mid-1960s, probably without any expectation that it would still be making people feel something well into the next century. That is the quiet miracle at the center of this story — not the fifteen weeks, not the film, not the arrangement, but the song itself, which turned out to be exactly as strong as it needed to be.