List of posthumous number ones on the UK Singles Chart

The death of a popular musician, and likewise, the use of a dead musician's work in advertising, often causes a sharp increase in sales of the musician's recordings and associated products; this has led to a number of posthumous number one singles in the UK and elsewhere. The phenomenon, a topic of discussion in both the media and academia, has occurred 19 times in the UK since 1959.

The UK Singles Chart is a record chart compiled on behalf of the British record industry based on sales of singles in the UK. Since 1997, the chart has been compiled by The Official Charts Company and was based entirely on sales of physical singles from retail outlets until 2005, when digital downloads were included in the chart compilation. The UK Singles Chart originated in 1952, when New Musical Express (NME) published the first chart of singles sales. The positions of all songs are based on week end sale totals, from Sunday to Saturday, but pre-1987, the charts were released on a Tuesday due to the need for manual calculation.

The first deceased artist to top the charts was Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash on 3 February 1959. Three weeks later his song "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" entered the charts, and in April it reached number one. In the 1960s Eddie Cochran and Jim Reeves achieved their first, and as of 2014 only, UK number ones after their deaths, as did Jimi Hendrix in 1970. In August 1977 the "King of Rock'n Roll",Elvis Presley, died of a heart attack and his song "Way Down", which was already in the charts at the time, quickly climbed to number one. Presley achieved four further posthumous number ones in the 2000s. In 2002 his song "A Little Less Conversation", a little-known former B-side, topped the charts after being remixed by Dutch dance music producer Junkie XL for a television advertisement for Nike, which broke Presley's long-standing tie with The Beatles for the most UK number ones. Three years later three of his singles returned to the top spot when all his previous number one singles were re-issued to mark what would have been his 70th birthday.

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