(Credits: Far Out / NASA / Uwe Conrad)
Mon 13 October 2025 8:00, UK
Ever since NME advertising manager Percy Dickins planted the seeds of the UK Official Charts back in 1952, the natural competitive glow of the coveted top spot has long endured as the pinnacle of pop grail.
It’s survived seismic changes. The album era’s rockist primacy, the loss of Top of the Pops, and the streaming era’s upending bulldoze still haven’t snuffed the singles chart’s sturdy measure of sales, albeit arguably less monolithic than it used to be. While the 2020s’ music climate is an altogether different realm from over 70 years ago, the number one slot still beckons with coveted glow, commanding a hefty cache in the music biz.
Many artists can boast a big bag of number ones, Elvis Presley knocking it out of the park in the UK with a whopping 21, but consecutive top hits are a truly impressive feat. The Beatles hit seven in a row from 1964’s ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ to the double A-side ‘Yellow Submarine / Eleanor Rigby’ two years later, but were matched by Irish boyband Westlife, ‘1999’s Swear It Again’ triggering a steady run of UK top spot entries until ‘My Love’ the following year.
To uncover the first band to score such a chart hat trick from their debut, we have to reach back into the pop sphere when a certain British Invasion hadn’t quite set its sights on global conquer, and Merseyside was most famous for its historic ports.
So, who was the first band to reach number one with their first three singles?
Way back in Liverpool’s Merseybeat scene in the early 1960s, it wasn’t entirely clear that The Beatles were to dominate the decade.
A huge ace up their sleeve was the internal songwriting chops between Paul McCartney and John Lennon, but debut single ‘Love Me Do’ sailed to a lowly 17 in the charts, and the infinitely better ‘Please Please Me’ struck second place due to woolly chart rules at the time, beaten by Cliff Richard’s drippy ‘Summer Holiday’.
Signed to EMI’s Parlophone label, and sharing both Brian Epstein and George Martin as respective manager and producer, Gerry and the Pacemakers struck gold before the Fab Four managed, off the success of debut single ‘How Do You Do It?’. Released in March 1963, a month before ‘From Me to You’s Beatlemania spark, Gerry Marsden and his Pacemakers band would enjoy the number one spot for three weeks, having cut the Mitch Murray-written piece originally offered to their labelmate competitors.
Murray would pen Gerry and the Pacemakers’ next chart topper, ‘I Like It’, and they’d score their third number one with a cover of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ showtune, becoming the official anthem of Liverpool FC and bellowed by their fans to this day.
Such a feat wasn’t witnessed til 20 years later, when fellow Scousers Frankie Goes to Hollywood scored the UK’s second debut single triple whammy with the hi-NRG bangers ‘Relax’, ‘Two Tribes’, and ‘The Power of Love’s festive balladry across the early 1980s.
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