Hello
Welcome to our second installment of UK Christmas Number One Singles – this time we’re taking a look at the nineties, when The Spice Girls, Cliff Richard and Queen were still fighting for the top spot (seems like a long time ago now).
1990 Cliff Richard “Saviour’s Day” (Strange, my memory must be failing me, as I thought Millennium Prayer was his last Christmas Number One.)
1991 Queen “Bohemian Rhapsody” / “These Are the Days of Our Lives” (To quote wikipedia: “Bohemian Rhapsody reached number one again in 1991, after Freddie Mercury’s death, achieving total sales of 2,176,000 and becoming the UK’s third best selling single of all time—beaten only by Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and Elton John’s “Candle In The Wind 1997″.)
These Are the Days of Our Lives
1992 Whitney Houston “I Will Always Love You” (Originally released by Dolly Parton, Whitney Houston covered this tune for the movie Bodyguard, in which she starred alongside Kevin Costner.)
1993 Mr Blobby “Mr Blobby” (No comment!)
1994 East 17 “Stay Another Day” (The band’s lead singer Tony Mortimer had written this song about his brother’s suicide, and had not intended it to be a Christmas tune at all, but the record company thought otherwise, added some bells and released it just before Christmas.)
1995 Michael Jackson “Earth Song” (along with “We Are the World“, “Man in the Mirror” and “Heal the World“, Michael Jackson is here trying to show his more socially conscious side.)
1996 Spice Girls “2 Become 1” (This was the first ballad the Spice Girls released as a single.)
1997 Spice Girls “Too Much” (The sixth consecutive number-one single in the UK for “girl-power”.)
1998 Spice Girls “Goodbye” (The first single without Geri Halliwell for The Spice Girls, and the beginning of the end for the group.)
1999 Westlife “I Have A Dream” / “Seasons in the Sun” (Seasons in the Sun is actually a very loose English translation of the song “Le Moribond” by Jacques Brel.)
Check out the original English version by Terry Jacks here:
