The best-selling pop duo of all time is coming to Allentown Fair’s grandstand.
Daryl Hall and John Oates, who had 34 singles on Billboard Hot 100 and 13 gold and platinum albums, will play the fair at 7 p.m. Sept. 1.
Tickets, at $79 and $109, go on sale at 10 a.m. Feb. 8 at the fair box office, at www.Ticketmater.com and at 800-745-3000. Tickets include fair admission.The box office will hold special hours 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Thursdays throughout February.
The show is the second, and the second top-selling duo, announced for the grandstand at the 167th Allentown Fair, which runs Aug. 27-Sept. 2.
Tickets are still available for Brooks & Dunn, country music’s best-selling duo of all time, on Aug. 29.
Hall & Oates, in a career of nearly 50 years, have sold 40 million albums and had 19 songs hit the Top 10 on various charts, nine of which went to No. 1.
Billboard magazine rated Hall & Oates at No. 15 on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time and the No. 1 duo. The duo was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003, and into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.
As a duo, Hall & Oates have released 18 studio albums, 12 live albums and 28 compilations, starting with 1972’s “Whole Oates.”
Its 1973 disc “Abandoned Luncheonette” sold platinum and broke into the Top 40 with the hit “She’s Gone.” But it found greater success with its fourth album, 1975’s “Daryl Hall & John Oates,” which broke the Top 20, went gold, and included the Top 5 gold hit “Sara Smile.”
That started a string of four straight gold albums through 1978. “Bigger Than the Bother of Us” in 1976 gave the duo its first No. 1 hit, “Rich Girl.”
Hall & Oates had even bigger success in the 1980s, starting with the 1980 platinum album “Voices” and its Top 5 hits “You Make My Dreams” and the gold “Kiss On My List.”
In 1981, the album “Private Eyes” also went platinum and had two No. 1 gold hits with the title track and “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do).”
The duo’s next two discs, 1982’s “H2O” and 1984’s “Big Bang Boom,” both charted in the Top 5 and sold double platinum, with No. 1 hits “Say It Isn’t So” and “Out of Touch.” Its compilation disc “Rock ’n Soul Part 1” also went Top 10 and sold double platinum.
Hall & Oates became the best-selling duo ever in 1987 and has held that designation for the past 32 years.
Its last platinum studio disc was 1988’s “Ooh Yeah,” which also was its last to chart in the Top 25 and last to have a Top 10 hit, “Everything Your Heart Desires.” Its 2001 compilation disc “The Very Best of Daryl Hall and John Oates” also sold platinum.
The duo’s most recent studio disc was 2003’s “Do It for Love.” It released albums of covers of soul hits, “Our Kind of Soul,” in 2004, and a holiday disc, “Home for Christmas,” in 2006. A live album, “Live in Dublin,” was released in 2015, and a compilation, “Timeless Classics,” in 2017.
Hall & Oates played sold-out shows at Sands Bethlehem Event Center in 2013 and 2015, and played to about 4,000 people at Allentown’s PPL Center in 2015.
This will be the first time the duo has played Allentown Fair, but Hall & Oates played non-fair shows at the fair grandstand in the summers of 1977 and 1988.
