Madonna’s most amazing chart week!

The week of August 3rd, 1985 was the most amazing chart week of Madonna’s life! This was the week where Madonna held the UK No.1, No.2 and No.16 chart positions in the UK singles chart!

Into The Groove was No.1, Holiday was No.2 and Crazy For You was No.16

Madonna is the only female performer ever to not only achieve this amazing feat, but to even come remotely close! In the process of achieving this record Into The Groove became the fastest selling single since Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ – the single which, together with Wham’s ‘Last Christmas‘ kept Like A Virgin off No.1 the previous Christmas.

This was no coincidence either. Rob Dickins CBE, the then head of Warner Music UK, had planned it as such, as he explains in the liner notes of a Promotional CD created to celebrate his amazing success at Warner:

“Working with Madonna was a total roller-coaster ride from day one. When I took over the record company, she was already asking to leave, unhappy about the result of her first single with my predecessors. One of my first tasks was to get to know the first album really well. As soon as I heard Holiday and Lucky Star, I knew she was going to be someone special and although our early single success did not have any radio support, through remixes and PR things were going well.

The second album, Like A Virgin, started to do well when we heard Into The Groove from the movie, Desperately Seeking Susan – and we desperately wanted to released the song as a single. I talked long and hard about this with Freddy DeMann, Madonna’s manager, telling him that I believed it would be her first No.1 in the UK. He was very tentative but really appreciated the job we had done to date and allowed us to go with it, although I believe we were the only country to do so at that time. The record exploded.

I had been a little jealous the previous summer as Frankie Goes To Hollywood had the No.1 and No.2 songs in the single chart. So we re-released Holiday, which had now become a Madonna classic, as a 12-inch picture disc (a sign of the times), and we achieved No.1 and No.2 at the same time. Madonnamania hit the heights.”

Two weeks earlier Madonna had given the entire planet their first glimpse of her amazing performing capabilities at Live Aid, performing both her No.1 and No.2 singles, in two weeks she would marry the ‘coolest guy in the world’ amid scenes of papparazzi chaos and end the year having had a staggering eight UK Top Ten singles!

Thanks to our Madonna Guru, Tony from London, for his Madonna Fact Of The Day