The 1970s File Feature
Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again
Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again: The Fortunes and Their 1971 Return to the Charts By 1971 the British pop group The Fortunes had already been through…
01 The Story
Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again: The Fortunes and Their 1971 Return to the Charts
By 1971 the British pop group The Fortunes had already been through several commercial cycles, rising to international prominence in the mid-1960s, dipping in the years that followed, and then staging a quiet but effective comeback at the turn of the decade. "Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again" was the record that crystallized their resurgence, combining the easy orchestral pop sensibility they had always possessed with a lyrical warmth that translated clearly across Atlantic radio formats.
The group was formed in Birmingham, England, in 1963, originally comprising Glen Dale, Barry Pritchard, Rod Allen, David Carr, and Andy Brown. They scored their breakthrough with "You've Got Your Troubles" in 1965, a song that reached the top five on both sides of the Atlantic and established them as serious contenders in the British Invasion era. Follow-up releases including "Here It Comes Again" and "This Golden Ring" kept them in the conversation through 1966, but the evolving tastes of the late 1960s were unkind to groups whose sound sat closer to pop craft than to psychedelia or hard rock.
Rather than dissolve, the group adjusted their lineup and kept recording. The early 1970s brought a renewed appetite among American audiences for smooth, melodic pop, and The Fortunes were well positioned to benefit. "Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again" was written by Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, the extraordinarily prolific British songwriting partnership responsible for dozens of chart standards across that era. Cook and Greenaway had an acute understanding of what made a song feel emotionally immediate: a simple metaphor, a memorable melodic hook, and a lyric that placed everyday feeling inside recognizable imagery.
The single was released in the United Kingdom on the Decca label and in the United States through Capitol Records. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 on May 15, 1971, debuting at number 89 and beginning a 14-week chart run that demonstrated genuine audience traction. The record climbed steadily through the spring, reaching number 58 by early June and continuing upward. It peaked at number 15 on July 31, 1971, making it one of the biggest American chart successes the group had achieved since their mid-decade prime. Fourteen weeks on the Hot 100 was a mark of sustained commercial appeal, not a spike driven solely by radio adds.
The production on the track was lush without being overwhelming, featuring layered vocal harmonies that had always been the group's strongest calling card. The Fortunes had always depended on tightly arranged multi-part vocals rather than a single dominant lead, and this song showcased that approach at its most polished. The arrangement incorporated strings in a manner typical of early 1970s British pop exports, giving the record a cinematic quality that helped it feel at home alongside American soft-rock contemporaries then dominating the airwaves.
In the United Kingdom the track also performed well, reinforcing that the group retained relevance at home while pursuing their American crossover. The song's chart performance in both territories gave The Fortunes a renewed profile with booking agents, television programmes, and variety shows on both sides of the Atlantic, translating chart success into a broader visibility that sustained their touring career through the early part of the decade.
Cook and Greenaway's songwriting machinery was operating at full capacity during this period. Their catalog from 1969 to 1973 includes songs recorded by artists as varied as the New Seekers, White Plains, and Blue Mink, several of which also crossed into the American top forty. Handing "Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again" to The Fortunes was a natural fit: the group's vocal blend matched the emotional register of Cook and Greenaway's writing precisely, producing a recording that sounded inevitable rather than calculated.
The song has endured on oldies radio and streaming platforms, accumulating nearly six million YouTube views in the decades since its release. That figure is a reminder that a record's commercial life does not end when it drops off the charts. For The Fortunes, the song remains the clearest example of their ability to survive and adapt through multiple eras of popular taste, finding a new audience with each rediscovery of the early 1970s soft-pop catalogue.
02 Song Meaning
Rainy Days as Emotional Memory: Reading the Feeling Inside "Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again"
"Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again" operates through one of popular music's most time-tested strategies: translating emotional experience into meteorological imagery. Rain in song has carried symbolic weight across centuries of poetry and music, standing in for grief, longing, melancholy, and the particular ache of remembering someone who is no longer present. Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway understood this tradition and deployed it with practiced precision, building a song whose central metaphor is both universally familiar and emotionally specific enough to feel personal.
The core experience the song describes is the involuntary return of sadness. The rainy day feeling does not arrive on schedule; it comes again, unbidden, carrying with it the full emotional residue of a relationship or period that the singer has been trying to move beyond. This is a psychologically accurate portrait of how loss actually behaves. People do not grieve in a straight line, and the song captures the way emotional recovery can seem complete right up until the moment the feeling ambushes you again without warning.
The word "again" in the title is doing significant work. It tells the listener immediately that this is not a first encounter with sorrow but a recurrence, which makes the situation both more familiar and more weary. The singer has been through this cycle before and recognizes the approaching emotional weather the way a person recognizes the smell of rain before the drops begin to fall. That recognition carries a kind of resigned acceptance, which gives the song a maturity that separates it from simple laments about romantic loss.
The Fortunes' vocal arrangement amplifies this sense of shared or communal melancholy. Because the song was performed by a group rather than a solo artist, the layered harmonies create the impression that the feeling described is not unique to one individual but broadly human, something recognized by anyone who has experienced the cyclical nature of grief. The ensemble vocal approach turns a private emotional moment into something that feels collectively understood.
There is also a quality of domesticity in the song's imagery that roots the emotional experience in everyday life rather than grand romantic drama. Rainy days are ordinary; they happen to everyone; they change the texture of a day without necessarily catastrophizing it. By choosing this modest, commonplace image rather than something more theatrical, Cook and Greenaway made the song's emotional content accessible to a much wider audience. The listener does not need to have experienced dramatic heartbreak to feel the truth of the song; they only need to have felt a grey afternoon pressing down on a mood already inclined toward reflection.
The melody reinforces this reading. It moves in gentle waves rather than sharp ascents or descents, mirroring the way a rainy day feeling washes over rather than crashes into a person. The production's use of strings supports the same emotional palette, adding warmth and a slightly melancholy sweetness that keeps the song from tipping into genuine despair. It is sad in the way that a grey day can be sad: atmospheric, contemplative, even quietly comforting in its honesty about how ordinary sadness feels.
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