Best singles
Thu 14 May We present to you a ranking of the greatest UK No 1 singles since the charts began in The only rule was that an artist could only feature once. As such, it is very much open to discussion, which we heartily encourage in the comments section. Also, note that dates listed are the dates the songs reached No 1. As much a generational bellwether as a pop classic.
The 25 best-selling music singles of all time
Thu 14 May We present to you a ranking of the greatest UK No 1 singles since the charts began in The only rule was that an artist could only feature once.
As such, it is very much open to discussion, which we heartily encourage in the comments section. Also, note that dates listed are the dates the songs reached No 1. As much a generational bellwether as a pop classic. The weirdness of 70s Britain in musical form.
Trevor Horn and co turned this material into postmodern gold, building jingles, prog, orchestral pop and more into a screwball fantasy. That cold steady kick drum, meanwhile, is like techno kicking the door down to take over pop culture.
After a fitfully successful start, this was the song to turn the Kosovan-British pop singer into a global star. The result is as compelling a single as produced. Sung with insouciant cool by the recently divorced Nancy Sinatra, however, it became something else entirely: camp but tough, funny but fierce, completely irresistible.
There will be howls of protestation at Bieber being on this list, a man routinely cited as everything that is facile about pop and celebrity.
Taking the Insta-filtered aesthetic of the then-popular tropical house sound and marrying it to a melody that flits like a bird of paradise always coming back to its perch, it has the melancholically fleeting beauty of a package holiday sunset. Like the Old Testament God, Craig chills on a Sunday, but unlike the Old Testament God, he spends Monday and Tuesday engineering sex and spends the rest of the days until the sabbath having it. We looked upon his creation and saw that it was good: his vocals, drilled in the dexterity of the garage rave, twine around delicate acoustic guitar lines like two lovers in Eden.
Most beautiful of all is Seal: half activist, half oracle. Decades of ubiquity have dulled the impact of I Will Survive, but the song only became ubiquitous in the first place because it connected with so many people so directly. Are You Ready for Love? The Thom Bell-assisted Philly soul production festoons John with strings, hand percussion, wah-wah guitar, key changes — in a sense perfectly echoing the maximalist, hasty approach to seduction that John has said he practised at the peak of his career.
Instead, Dave and Fredo use steady, perfectly calibrated flows to set themselves apart from the London MCs one generation above them, set to minimalist trap. The pop charts were particularly dominated by sweeping, sentimental ballads until the mids, and there are PhDs to be written on the effect on pop music of a sexually repressed culture of manners. Anyway, many such ballads are suffocatingly schmaltzy, but this one is sublime.
The pair had an affair, with Hatch leaving his wife and marrying Trent — this collaboration is full of that impetuous, untameable ardour. Perhaps it takes not having lived through the 80s heyday of new age, then its subsequent ubiquity and mockery to appreciate Orinoco Flow as the compositional marvel it is. The junglist breakbeats keep the energy high, while the big piano chords and yearning vocals are like a head massage from some bloke you just met but nevertheless now feel a deeper kinship with than your immediate family.
Channelling Bach and the Beats, the trippy imagery of this 10m seller made it a fave of those turning on and tuning in during the Summer of Love. The heaviest, sweariest No 1 in UK history — with one of the best riffs, too — only reached No 25 when it was first released in , but reached the top in after a grassroots campaign from people angry at a run of X Factor contestants dominating the Christmas No 1 race. Dance music No 1s almost always bang, but this one pumps: a deep-house anthem of huge subtlety and power.
The confusing rush of ecstasy, in every sense, has never been so beautifully evoked. With its gospel vocals and cathedral-ready chords, it makes raving feel like a serious spiritual quest rather than something to do on a Friday.
Pop holds few greater pleasures than seeing a pop song about the power of pop songs take on that kind of lure itself. Come on Eileen became that song: a romp through wistfulness, bonhomie and knees-up antics that distils the riotous emotional arc of a night in an Irish pub into three-and-a-half perfect minutes. This is a Terminator of a song, unstoppably delivering a payload of pure euphoria as Chicago house is spliced with Italo disco to create perfect pop.
Coming full circle, Stan is worthy of it. The original German version is still the best, however. A fabulously bitchy kiss-off to the three members of Cockney Rebel who left the band after their album The Psychomodo, the genius of Make Me Smile Come Up and See Me is to couch its screw-you message in the sunniest, most charming, irresistibly hook-laden music imaginable.
Jailhouse Rock was intended as a joke by writers Leiber and Stoller, complete with a nudging reference to gay sex. Elvis, however, ignored the comic undercurrent, and sang it with such blazing intensity that the performance almost collapses at If you want a No 1 that captures his early, feral power, this is it. Most mids indie nostalgia is tinged with shame: the polka dots, bad fringes and herky-jerky dancing have not dated well.
After all that Ariana Grande had been through — the Manchester Arena bombing, the death of a beloved ex, a broken engagement — she could have released 10 minutes of primal screaming and still left critics saying: yeah, fair enough. The way the choir, timpani, strings, horns, guitars and more all stay meringue-fluffy is arranger Ivor Raymonde just showing off, really. After a labour-intensive recording process featuring endless harmonising and dozens of feet of tape loops, 10cc came away with this work of stubborn beauty: a sublime, shimmering evocation of the ineffable bond between two lovers.
It endures in every sense: Stewart and Gloria have been married for more than 50 years. A posthumous chart-topper after her death in a plane crash when she was 22, More Than a Woman is one of the trio of masterpiece singles she made with Timbaland, along with We Need a Resolution and Try Again. It never gets less wrenching to think what else she might have done. Ah, the song of the summer. On one hand, All the Things She Said is the ne plus ultra of queerbaiting: two straight Russian teenagers cajoled into lesbian cosplay by some dodgy-sounding svengalis.
The boy band — well, Gary Barlow — had already shown they could do serious and affecting balladry with A Million Love Songs , and then they perfectly honed that skill for this classic breakup song.
Other early house hits had at least come with a song or a hook attached, but this had neither: it may be the most minimal No 1 of all time. A new high-water mark of commercial success for British rap was set by this incandescently brilliant wave of London MCs, each given 21 seconds of time on the mic. Everyone with even a glancing interest in pop knows Bohemian Rhapsody, which means its sheer audacity is easy to overlook. And, hey, if it was good enough for Larry Levan … LS.
He was six months early, but Numan was always ahead of his time: oft-mocked, his alienated-suburbanite-in-a-world-of-technology schtick now seems remarkably prescient. One of the greatest Christmas No 1s of all time is a triumph of emotional candour. It resembles a breakup song with its talk of final kisses, but was written by Tony Mortimer after his brother killed himself.
It remains an astonishingly intense way to spend three minutes. There are plenty of arguments for Heart of Glass not really qualifying as the only UK No 1 punk single. It pissed off the punk purists back home — which is, incidentally, pretty much the most punk thing you could do by The production on Merry Xmas Everybody is fuzzy as tinsel the result of recording in an echoey corridor , potent as plum pudding doused in brandy and appropriately poignant, straddling that late-December divide between nostalgia and optimism.
On his breakthrough single, Tom Jones exhibits the kind of determined perkiness that can only accompany truly desperate heartbreak. It is a portal into a world of glamour — the litany of classic Hollywood in the middle eight, but also the world of peacocking ballroom culture it was borne from — where you find Madonna herself presiding over the decadence with her commands and observations.
Get up on the dancefloor, indeed. A masterpiece of synthetic production: the gorgeously wrong approximations of horns, bass guitar and piano have their own delirious beauty. The arrival of You Really Got Me amid the still relatively mild No 1s of the time must have been startling — it even makes the Beatles sound like squares. Satisfaction is pissed off, provocative, dirty, thrilling; everything great about the mids Rolling Stones condensed into 3 minutes and 45 seconds.
Written by Motown brains trust Holland-Dozier-Holland, Band of Gold sees Payne sitting in a lonely bedroom, her wedding night gone disastrously unconsummated after some kind of freak-out by the groom. As the KLF, they brought every one of their tricks to bear on this titanic piece of rave: hip-house rapping, gospel choirs, chants about an ancient race of people and a huge synthetic guitar riff. What on earth was it on about? The mystery was the final key to its success.
On first listen, the song seemed deceptively featherweight. The strings sound like ringtones; the guitar parts as though they were lifted from a PlayStation 2 game. It is telling that Call Me Maybe was intended as a folk song; it would be catchy played on a kazoo, or underwater.
Read our full review here. Elle Hunt. Old Town Road was unstoppable, with no apparent end to its appeal. Children rioted in their love for it. Its vast stable of remixes made it a genre-splicing Rosetta stone. Owen Myers. Dave Simpson.
This was always a Kylie classic in the making. Is it about a crush? A recent heartbreak? Does the person Minogue is singing about know about the obsession? What is the dark secret she is harbouring? Michael Cragg. This will be updated each day until the No 1 is announced. Spotify users, use the playlist below or click here. Apple Music users can click here. This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and makes a purchase.
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"(Everything I Do) I Do It for You". John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.
View Charts Legend. The Twist. Mack The Knife. How Do I Live. Party Rock Anthem.
This is a list of best-selling singles in the world. According to Guinness , "White Christmas" sold over 50 million copies.
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The Best Selling Singles in The World
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The best-selling singles of all time on the Official UK Chart
This list of the 30 best selling singles in the world reveals three Christmas hits, three charity singles, four film theme songs, novelty records and artists from Japan, Germany, Africa, Italy, Sweden, the UK and US. The English version, with completely different lyrics presents a vision of nostalgia for two veterans reminiscing in old age about a lost battle in which they participated. Released British folk singer Roger Whittaker hosted a radio programme in the UK in , and would invite listeners to send their poems or lyrics in and he would attempt to make songs out of them. Ron A. The Mills Brothers originally known as the Four Kings of Harmony were an African-American jazz and pop vocal quartet who made more than 2, recordings that sold more than 50 million copies. The backing track for the record was recorded in 45 minutes as a demo. The song, which uses the quintessential Oriental riff, a short musical phrase that is used to signify Chinese culture was released as a single in on the cusp of a chopsocky film craze. Lifted from her twenty-second album of the same name, it became her fourth number one single and made Cher the oldest female artist at the age of 52 to perform this feat. Written by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure in reaction to television reports of the — famine in Ethiopia.
The most recent of these was carried out by Virgin Radio. The resulting chart was unveiled in Dec
They're the very top of the pops — the UK's million-selling singles, the tracks that have achieved one million paid-for sales, whether they be physical singles or downloads. It's still a relatively rare feat, with currently only songs making it to seven figures. Not all of them managed to make it to Number 1 — 28 million-sellers never hit the top spot — but they've earned their place in British pop history.
Best No 1 singles, 1952-2012 – full list
The best-selling singles of all time are heavy on pop, but not a whole lot outside of that. Rock, country, and rap are scattered throughout, but are largely missing from the top Ed Sheeran, though, claimed the top spot with "Thinking Out Loud. We put together RIAA's data on the 25 best-selling singles of all time, which is based on certified units sold in the US. Watch the music video here. Listen to the audio here. Watch music video here. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Login Subscribe Subscribe. My Account. BI Prime Intelligence Logout. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Travis Clark.
The 100 greatest UK No 1s: 100-17
Australian Artist Singles. Australian Artist Albums. Compilation Albums. Here are the official top 50 songs, pop, rock and all genres:. Latest News More News. Blinding Lights The Weeknd. Toosie Slide Drake. Savage Megan Thee Stallion. Say So Doja Cat.
