From my mate Rowan Forster:
As an incurable and incorrigible music trivia tragic, I could hardly let this opportunity pass without mentioning that 38 years ago, another sung version of the Lord’s Prayer became the first Australian recording ever to sell over a million copies in the USA. (In fact it went all the way to number #4 on the US charts, in April 1974.)
It all started when a 17-year-old Adelaide girl named Janet Mead became a nun by joining the Sisters of Mercy Convent. Sister Mead and a group she called her Rock Band provided music for a weekly “rock mass” at the Adelaide Cathedral. Her music also began attracting attention via her weekly radio program.
In 1973, she was asked to make some recordings that would be distributed only to local churches and schools. Festival Records became interested, and decided to use one of these recordings for her first broad-release record. The song they chose was Sister Janet’s version of a song by Donovan called “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”, about St.Francis and Sister Clare. They needed something to put on the B-side of the record, so they used a “funky” version of the Lord’s Prayer that Sister Janet had used in some of her weekly rock masses.
As has happened on more than one occasion in the history of pop (Bill Hayley’s “Rock Around the Clock” is another example), it was the B-side that took off — right into the stratosphere. Within a matter of months, no fewer than two million copies of “The Lord’s Prayer” had been sold, including, as mentioned, over a million in the USA.
And the story has a footnote which is as impressive and heart-warming as it is unsurprising: Sister Janet donated all of her considerable royalties to charity.
She continued recording for Festival, and at least one further single was released in the US — “Take my Hand”.
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