The document that’s acknowledged by the Official Charts Company because the UK’s bestselling artist album of all time, Queen’s first Greatest Hits assortment, started its reign on November 14, 1981. It’s gone on turn out to be the primary album in UK chart historical past to achieve 7 million UK chart “sales,” a milestone reached lately by the addition of downloads and streams to its huge complete as a bodily launch.
In 2014, the OCC had confirmed that Greatest Hits was the primary album to cross gross sales in Britain of six million copies, some 900,000 copies forward, to February that yr, of ABBA’s Gold anthology. To add to the distinction, the Greatest Hits II album, launched precisely a decade later in October 1991, only a month earlier than the premature dying of Freddie Mercury, stood at No.10 in that all-time gross sales record, with an additional 3.9 million UK gross sales.
The first Greatest Hits, launched somewhat over seven and a half years into the band’s chart lifespan, and with their “Under Pressure” collaboration with David Bowie simply seven days away from changing into Queen’s second chart-topping single, the retrospective gave them their third No.1 UK album. It had opened at No.2, behind British rock’n’curler Shakin’ Stevens’ Shaky, earlier than beginning the primary of 4 weeks on the high. The assortment additionally topped the charts on first launch in Germany, Holland and Austria amongst different markets.
Seen by many because the definitive hits assortment by any artist, it had by November 2022 risen to an astonishing mixture of 1023 weeks within the weekly UK Top 100, 343 of them spent contained in the Top 40 and 56 within the Top 10.
The hits package deal was within the Top 5 each week till the tip of January 1982 and remained within the Top 75 for nearly a yr, till the tip of September. It has reappeared at common intervals ever since, and as Queen’s legend grew, the album spent an unbroken run of 224 weeks on the Top 100 between 1983 and 1987.
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Mercury’s unhappy dying did, after all, give Greatest Hits new momentum, with a nine-week sequence within the Top 10 from late 1991 alongside its second quantity. The success of the Bohemian Rhapsody movie and its soundtrack propelled the gathering again into the UK Top 30 as soon as once more and, within the digital period, it has spent its chart life from 2019 onwards again within the Top 40, and sometimes larger. Few, if any, albums within the historical past of British music have been fairly so indispensable.
Buy or stream Queen’s Greatest Hits.