Hallelujah Takes Top 2 Spots at Christmas
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Unprecedented Christmas chart has 3 versions of the same song.
Continuing the trend of the previous three years, this year’s Christmas No.1 was a forgone conclusion and the top spot was virtually secured by the time Dermot O’Leary crowned Alexandra Burke the winner of The X Factor 2008.
Alexandra’s version of the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah sold 576,000 copies eclipsing the record set by Leona Lewis when she won the talent competition back in 2006 with A Moment Like This.
Alexandra wrote herself into the record books as the fastest selling female solo artist and broke European records by receiving 105,000 downloads in one day.
With such a strong backing from the millions who tuned in each week to The X Factor, it was always going to be a one horse race. However, an anti-X Factor rebel rising on internet social network site Facebook encouraged people to download a rival version of Cohen’s song by Jeff Buckley.
The “support the Jeff Factor” campaign gathered quite a following and catapulted the Buckley version of the song to the second spot in the Christmas chart, although the total sales equated to just 14 per cent of Alexandra’s success.
In what has been a stunning week for Mr Cohen, his own original version of the song also made it into the top 40 with a placing at number 36. The last time the same song occupied both the top two spots in the singles chart was over half a century ago.
Tommy Steele and Guy Mitchell held positions one and two respectively back in January 1957 with Singing The Blues. For one song to appear three times in the same chart is unprecedented.
Fellow X Factor winner Leona Lewis was number three in the charts with her cover version of Snow Patrol’s hit song Run.
HMV’s Gennaro Castaldo told the BBC: “It was pretty much a given that Alexandra Burke’s cover of Hallelujah would dominate the race for this year’s Christmas number one, but it’s been such a strange year that we thought the charts would throw up some kind of a surprise, and the twist came in the form of the Jeff Buckley cover.”
