Who was the first musician to have two number one albums in a year?
Many things fascinate me about The Beatles.
In fact, I get overwhelmed by the amount of things that fascinate me about the band, for their creativity is a rabbit hole that can be endlessly explored. But something that I have never seemed to understand is how they could be so great and so prolific at the very same time.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realise that great things take time, especially albums. In fact, I actively enjoy my favourite artists taking a multiple-year hiatus to carve out an album that has been laboured over for a long period of time. More than that, I enjoy living with that album for the next handful of years, patiently waiting for their next release to follow.
But The Beatles didn’t care about that. They released album after album, 12 studio albums to be exact, in the space of roughly seven years, which meant for each of those years, they were releasing two at a time. None of these albums was exactly a dud either. They were albums that cemented the legacy of greatness we now enjoy over half a century later, and so as I try to unpack the greatness that was The Beatles, the thing I can consistently struggle to understand is how they could be so prolific and innovative simultaneously.
Naturally, because of this, The Beatles were a band that topped the UK album charts twice in one year. They did it in their early years, when their emergence truly changed the world of music, in 1963, 1964 and 1965. But moreover, it sadly goes to prove that those early, pre-LSD records were the most commercially palatable.
While The Beatles’ work rate was truly unmatched, they weren’t the only members of UK music royalty to achieve the feat. Elton John did it in 1973, 1974 and 1990, while David Bowie did it in both 1973 and 2016, the latter being the year of his death and the year of his final album release, Blackstar.
But who was the very first person to do it?
Common judgment would suggest that the answer was Elvis Presley. Before Beatlemania kicked in and the four lads from Liverpool were on the tip of every fan’s tongue, it was Elvis who dominated the discourse.
He was the first real rock star and changed how music was perceived within the mainstream. His quivering voice and even more quivering knees dominated the charts in the late 1950s and early 1960s, culminating in a two-time album chart-topping in 1962.
But it was his compatriot, Frank Sinatra, who was the very first musician to achieve the feat. He topped the UK album charts twice in 1957. He released four albums that year: Close To You And More, A Swingin’ Affair, A Jolly Christmas From Frank Sinatra and Where Are You? But it was only a Swingin’ Affair that hit number one out of those four, and was then joined by his 1956 compilation album This Is Sinatra at the top of the tree in 1957.
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