The cult singer is still living off Whole Wide World, his very first song – and it wasn’t even a hit. As the riotous raconteur releases a new album, he talks bloody marys, brake failures and near death by Covid
As Eric Goulden concedes, the last few years have been rather a mixed bag. On the plus side, his most famous song, Whole Wide World, enjoyed yet another of its periodic leases of life. It was the first song he ever released, in 1977, one of a succession of classic punk-era singles that came out on the celebrated indie label Stiff. It didn’t make the charts but, thereafter, Whole Wide World simply refused to go away. It’s been covered by everyone from the Monkees to the Proclaimers to Green Day. It’s been translated into Italian and Finnish. And it has appeared on umpteen movie soundtracks – Will Ferrell sang it in Stranger Than Fiction.
This time, it turned up on a TV ad for travel company Expedia, starring Ewan McGregor. The commercial debuted during 2022’s Super Bowl, which was watched by 200 million people, with the inevitable knock-on effect: Whole Wide World’s streaming figures soared to over 16.3m on Spotify, 16m more than everything else Goulden has released in the intervening 46 years. “It’s fantastic,” he enthuses. “I mean, I could get very churlish and moan about it – ‘I’ve got all these other songs!’ And I have done in the past – ‘It was all downhill after that! I’m so much more than that!’ But thank God, because without it, I’m dead in the water. I love that I have it.”
