What’s the most number one singles from one classic rock album?
Forget classic rock; pop hegemony is real, and if we look at the charts across time, the consensus in the industry is that pop sells.
We needn’t really look further for the reason why so many iconic alternative bands have wandered into pop territory (Bring Me The Horizon, Maroon 5, Fall Out Boy): cash, baby. A 13-minute epic about an iridescent diamond isn’t quite going to appeal to the masses, is it, and instead, we have kitsch pop classics written by bozos who have championed AI for years.
If we consider the albums out there that have gained top-spot privilege, we’d have a smorgasbord of cheese, cringe, and some quiet pop gems, but we can go further than that and look at the albums that have had the most number-one singles and the kinds of work that we are contending with when we think about the multi-headed dragon guarding the pop-chart ladders.
On the face of it, there is no room for rock music. Coming in first is, incredibly, Westlife’s self-titled 1999 album, which boasted five number-one singles, such as the karaoke-scarred ‘Flying Without Wings’ and ‘If I Let You Go’. Following them, garnering four number-one singles in a singular collection are the likes of Take That’s Everything Changes, Spice Girls’ Spice, B*Witched’s self-titled 1998 album, Dizzee Rascal’s Tongue n’ Cheek and Lady Gaga’s classic The Fame / The Fame Monster.
The general trend in this selection shows the CD-boom impact; in the early 2000s, people had to own an album if they wanted to listen to the music. They couldn’t quite trust airplay, so it was much more likely for music lovers to find several hits to cling to in one LP, rather than hop-skip-jumping around playlists with a singular album track peppered throughout the best of a genre, or a time period.
Surely a classic rock artist pulled in three number-one singles from one album, then? Dear reader, as tragic as it is, this isn’t the case. Black Eyed Peas, Justin Bieber, Bruno Mars, S Club 7, and Wham! are just a few of the 22 artists to achieve this honour, with Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet being the last to do so.
With classic rock’s finest nowhere to be seen, we need to ask where all the best-selling albums were. Pink Floyd had a hearty run in the early to mid-1970s, with the number-one albums The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973 and 1975’s Wish You Were Here, while there was Aerosmith, whose Greatest Hits compilation hit number one in 1980; however, none of these classic rock gods pulled in two number-one singles on one album, an honour which goes to Jon Bon Jovi’s third studio album, Slippery When Wet, released by Mercury Records in 1986.
Four years earlier, Michael Jackson’s 1982 Thriller bagged two chart hits with the crowd-pleasers ‘Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’, but the R&B and soul inflexion melting across the album’s landscape like a purple-blue horizon line doesn’t quite lend the project a means to wear the classic rock crown, so Bon Jovi, it must be, with ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ and ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’, alongside a special mention for ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’, which peaked at seventh spot.
No offence to the band, who are still going strong with the promise of a Wembley Stadium show this September, but this classic rock record seems somewhat sterile.
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