Category: Did you know?

Following on from last week’s 1959 – 1989 list of Italian number ones that made the top 10 in the UK but not number one, now here is the 1990 – 2020 list.

I’m doing this in two parts  – here is a list of UK top 10 hits (but not number ones) that made number one in Italy. Between 1959 and 2020 there have been a total of 123. Here is the 1959 – 1989 list.

I did a list of these way back in 2013 and it’s time to update it as things have changed. Back in 1994, Mariah Carey released the song All I Want for Christmas is you which peaked at number two and has subsequently entered the UK chart since 2014 when downloads were counted towards the UK singles chart even though, due the bizarre rules the OCC seem to have invented which really obscures the reality of the chart, it’s been permanently on ACR which stand for Accelerated Chart Ratio. In a net shell, this means that ‘sales’ of old tracks that return to the chart down have the same ratio of streams to sales. Why? Who knows! This is probably one of the reasons the chart is so irrelvant to anyone outside the music industry.

The song has returned to chart every Christmas since 2014 and has peaked, again, at number two on three further occasions. But on week ending 19th December 2020 the song finally went to number one which means it was no longer the biggest selling single not to get to number one. This is the reason for updating this table and here is the current top 10 singles to fall into that category.

Four years ago I did a connection round at my start of year quiz where all the song had a twist at the end, I’ve since found a few more, here are 15 examples.

In the UK we had 20 different number one during 2020, in American they had 21, for those interested here’s the list;

Many songs have been recorded that include a time of day or night in the title. I’ve ignored the many that include midnight which is the most common time and the same with song that mention noon. Here are 30 songs with a specific time in the title.