Welcome back my friends to the flamboyance that never ends, as Fabulously Flamboyant Friday sashays up to the crease to deliver yet another light-loafered, lubed-up googly from the gasworks-end of musical magnificence.
Please be welcome to part three in our short series of articles that are guaranteed to contain no weirdos, nothing obscure, nothing remotely challenging and no tunes not thoroughly well known to both the man on the Clapham omnibus and his dear ol’ mum.
Over the next few weeks we shall continue our count down of the UK’s all-time, best-selling artists (as measured by single sales). So be assured, pop-pickers, only the most popular pop performers and their most poptastic pop choonage will make the utterly ruthless cut for these articles – not arf!
This week, we reach the Top 40 and kick things off with a very fine placing for Cliff Richard & The Shadows – and it’s worth noting this well deserved position at No.40 does not include any sales figures for Sir Cliff as a solo artist.
When the band formed in 1958 they were originally called The Drifters, but were soon forced (once they started to find success in the US) to change their name to avoid any legal action from the American artistes of the same name. They quickly settled on Cliff Richard & The Shadows, and the rest is history.
Over the course of their career The Shadows have landed a frankly impressive 69 UK hit singles, 35 as The Shadows and 34 as Cliff Richard & The Shadows, with legendary plank-spanker, Hank Marvin, having the great honour of becoming one of the UK’s first guitar heroes and of course a popular term in cockney rhyming slang – immortality, indeed.
And at number 39 we find Pink – a young lady who has sold well over 135 million records worldwide, making her one of the world’s best-selling musical artistes. Various sources claim that Pink (if you include all of them there newfangled streamy-downloady thingies) is the most-played female artist in the UK during the 21st century. I must admit, I’m quite surprised by that. If asked to guess, I probably would have said The Blessed Tay Tay.
Pink’s accolades include nine MTV Awards, three Grammy Awards, two Brit Awards, an Emmy Award and the very snappily titled “BMI President’s Award for outstanding achievement in songwriting and global impact on pop culture and the entertainment industry”. Billboard named her as the Woman of the Year in 2013 and VH1 ranked her 10th on their list of the all-time 100 Greatest Women in Music.
OK, I think it’s time for some Sweaties: Wet Wet Wet make it onto our chart at a very respectable 38 – and frankly I’m genuinely surprised they are so highly placed. However, on closer inspection, the lads seem to have racked up 30 UK hit singles – a goodly total indeed – with a few of them becoming genuine chart monsters. Additionally, for their first five studio albums, there was absolutely no messing around with any piddling little Gold Album certifications for Wet Wet Wet. Oh, no – it was Platinum Albums all the way for the bonny lads from Clydebank. If you fancy catching the boys live, they are still touring and still recording.
And at No. 37 we welcome the first blue movie star to appear on our poptastic Top 60 chart. Well, a Smurfette, to be strictly accurate: Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, aka Katy Perry (who provides the movie voice for Smurfette in one of the most deeply irritating film series on the planet).
When she’s not being a Smurf, Ms. Perry has managed to find time to become one of the most successful and best-selling music artists of all time. She has shifted over 143 million records worldwide and has been dubbed the “Queen of Camp” by both Vogue and Rolling Stone. Billboard ranks her at twenty-five on their list of the “Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century” and she even managed to put up with having Russell Brand as her husband for roughly two years – and that ranks as a seriously impressive achievement as far as I’m concerned. I am unable to applaud her musicality, but I salute her stoic indefatigability.
Crèche time, as young Justin Bieber makes it into our chart at No. 36. We shall of course sidestep all matters Diddy and simply point out that the young lad has had a rather successful career.
Bieber is one of those rare artists who can quite honestly say meh! to scoring a Platinum Album certification – this lad deals in Diamond Album awards and has set well over 30 (Guinness certified) world records for album, single, chart and concert sales – this boy ain’t no slouch.
Bieber became the first artist, since Elvis Presley, to replace his own song at number one on the UK Singles Chart, he was the first artist in history to simultaneously occupy the top three positions of the UK Singles Chart and he currently holds the world record for the most simultaneous tracks on the US Billboard chart.
He is also one of the new generation of pop music stars whose position on this chart is heavily influenced by his huge success at this streamy-downloady malarkey, and he currently holds world records for the most streamed track in one week and the most streamed album in one week – a “factoid” I’m sure carries great weight with the hip young things on this site.
Having recently reached the tender age of 30, our cuddly Canadian cub is of course one of the best-selling music artists of all time, with worldwide estimated physical sales of well over 150 million records and untold billions of streamy-downloady thingies.
In at No.35 in our chart we find Beyoncé – and we are now getting into the realm of some genuine heavy hitters. Beyoncé has sold well over 200 million records worldwide, is quite obviously one of the best-selling music artists of all time and her accolades include an astonishing thirty two – 32! – Grammy Awards. That is a seriously impressive haul.
Beyoncé began her career as a member of the girly group, Destiny’s Child, and quite frankly they did very well indeed. They landed a substantial string of multi-Platinum Albums, a couple of dozen hit singles, worldwide record sales of around sixty million and a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame – not a bad effort at all. However, as splendid as all this was, Beyoncé was just getting warmed up and her career really began to take off when, at around the turn of the century, she embarked on her solo career as both an actress and a singer.
Since then she has racked up an impressive string of massively successful albums, singles, tours and movies. She is one of the highest earning female musicians of the 21st century and in 2016, when the BBC Radio 4 programme Woman’s Hour ran a poll to find the women judged to have had the biggest impact on the lives of women over the past 70 years, Beyoncé came in at a very respectable No. 7, alongside the likes of The Blessed Margaret, Barbara “bouncy” Castle and Germaine “sucking-on-a-lemon” Greer.
At No. 34 we find the Irish boy band, Westlife. Having never really cracked the lucrative US market, Westlife are (unlike many of the artists below them on this chart) most definitely not on any list of the world’s best selling artists. However, with their sales massively concentrated in the UK and Eire, the lads have certainly done alright with this very respectable placing on our chart.
Westlife emerged from the Louis Walsh stable (manager of fellow Irish bands Boyzone and Jedward) and became a huge success in the 1990s. The boys have sold more than 55 million records worldwide, have accumulated a total of 26 top ten hits and a very substantial 15 number one singles. They have also racked up 8 number one albums and 13 top 5 albums in the United Kingdom alone.
On the international scene they have managed a very impressive 36 number-one albums worldwide, which has earned them a fair few entries in the Guinness Book Of World Records, including (for a while, at least) an entry as the top-selling album group in the United Kingdom in the 21st century – pretty impressive considering their (at the time) largely teeny demographic.
These days some of the lads have their feet up, some have solo careers and some tour with their former Boyzone stable-mates as “Boyzlife”, and they are apparently still doing very good business on the hot flush menopausal circuit.
At number 33 we find Frank Farian (who? I hear you say) in his cunning disguise as the poptastic German Eurodisco stars of the sensational ’70s – Boney M.
Some older Puffins (those hip-to-the-scene Daddy-Os who still regularly spin the latest hot platters from popular beat combos of the day) may well remember the Milli Vanilli “scandal” of the early 1990s.
Milli Vanilli were an R&B duo from Munich (Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus) who were making great headway in Europe and the U.S. with a string of No. 1 hits and a Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1990. The reality of course was somewhat different. Neither of the lads actually performed on their records (simply lip-synching during “live” performances) as they were the “pretty boy” front for the well known German singer, songwriter and producer, Frank Farian.
Milli Vanilli were simply a studio creation (top notch session singers, musicians and professional writers) with a couple of good looking lads out front to do the TV promotion and in-concert work. This was nothing unusual in the pop music business, but when the story broke it was seen as a huge scandal. Their Grammys were returned (just four days after they had been won), Farian cheerfully ‘fessed up’ to his studio shenanigans and the career of Milli Vanilli was over.
However, there was a certain amount of industry surprise about all the fuss and bother around this episode because, quite frankly, not only was Frank Farian already well known for this sort of activity, he was also very, very good at it.
Let us not beat around the ornamental shrubbery here, Frank Farian was (sadly he left us earlier this year) a very big deal in the music business. Over the course of his monumentally successful career he is believed to have sold over 850 million records and earned a truly astonishing 800 gold and platinum certifications. That really is quite an achievement and one hell of a career. If the record sales of the various projects he created, guided and developed were all credited to him, he would top our chart with ease. However, as things stand, most have never even heard of him.
Back in the ’70s, when Frank was first getting started, his initial big success came with the creation of another hugely popular band-that-never-was in the form of the 70’s Eurodisco superstars known and loved as Boney M.
In 1974 Farian recorded Baby Do You Wanna Bump? under the pseudonym of Boney M and, to his delight, the song started selling very well indeed. Frank quickly recruited Bobby Farrell (to dance and lip-synch to Farian’s vocals), Liz Mitchell, Marcia Barrett (who would both later perform on Boney M. material) and Maizie Williams to become the collective performance face of Boney M.
The project was a huge success and Boney M sold many millions of records worldwide. In fact two of their singles, Rivers of Babylon/Brown Girl in the Ring and Mary’s Boy Child (the 1978 Christmas number one single in the UK) remain, to this day, two of the biggest selling singles of all time and two of Frank Farian’s biggest global hits.
And at No. 32 we find (somewhat surprisingly for me) the American hip hop group, the Black Eyed Peas. They have sold an estimated 80 million records worldwide, making them one of the best-selling musical acts of all time. They have racked up an impressive 20 hit singles in the UK, with more than a few of them earning Platinum Awards, and they have also picked a sackful of international awards, including several Grammy Awards.
And we wrap things up at 31 with our final artiste for the evening – the deeply tedious Coldplay. However, as unenthused as I am by this band, I must put my cynicism aside and deliver the unpalatable and deeply depressing truth: Coldplay are easily one of the most successful acts the UK has ever produced.
They are of course one of the best-selling music acts of all time, they were the first group to reach 90 million monthly listeners on Spotify (streamy/downloady thingies), they are the most awarded British band in history, they hold the record for most Brit Awards won by a band, they are responsible for three of the 50 best-selling albums of all time, they have notched up two of the highest-grossing tours of all time, they hold the record for the most attended tour of all time – and they bore me utterly utterly rigid. Nevertheless, we shall wrap things up for tonight with one of their biggest hits.
Anyway, if any of you are still awake after that last track, that’s yer lot for this week’s edition of Fabulously Flamboyant Friday. We shall continue our poptastic chart countdown in part four of this series, but, for the moment at least, it’s TTFN Puffins – Good night, and may your Frog go with you. Not ‘arf.
Featured Image: Birchflow, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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