Saturday Deluxe / 9 December 2023

Peter Gabriel’s new album i/o has entered the UK album chart at number one this week! It’s his first UK number one since So back in 1986 and his third in total (Peter Gabriel 3 aka ‘Melt’ also hit the top spot in 1980).

i/o sold a total of 15,647 units made up of 11,178 CDs (that includes the 2CD+blu-ray edition) along with 2320 vinyl albums, 1420 digital downloads and 737 sales equivalent streams. Despite their being two different vinyl editions (Bright-Side and Dark-Side mixes) for chart purposes Realworld would have made sure that these were accepted at the same album and didn’t count separately. A good thing too, because less than 700 sales separated Gabriel from South Korean K-pop boy band Ateez who for most of the week looked like they’d deny PG a number one with their album World EP: Fin, but in the end they fell short with 14,972 sales.

Peter Gabriel almost holds one of those now fashionable ‘longest gap between…’ records. With 37 years between number one studio albums, only ABBA can beat that with the 40 years between The Visitors (1981) and Voyage (2021).

In other album news, Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret is a re-entry at number 31, its first chart appearance in the chart for over 40 years. Its number nine in the physical album charts, 13 places ahead of Trevor Horn’s Echoes – Ancient and Modern (which stalled at lowly 81 on the ‘proper’ album chart).

In other chart news, having taken over 36 years to finally get to number one on the UK singles chart, Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’ can’t stop getting to the top! Having finally reached the summit in 2021 the song repeated the feat in 2022 and again at the very beginning of this year. So this is now the fourth time! Next week Sony are releasing the festive favourite on CD single and green vinyl seven-inch but they might be wondering if they should have bothered – it doesn’t seem necessary. That said, with no Ladbaby this year (small mercies) they’ll be hoping for ‘Last Christmas’ to be number one on Christmas Day itself (something that hasn’t happened yet) and I could easily see ‘Last Christmas’ dropping a place or two only to reclaim the top spot again. We shall see…

Read the SDE review of Peter Gabriel’s i/o. Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, Echoes – Ancient & Modern and i/o are all available on blu-ray audio with Atmos Mixes, via the SDE shop, with the first two being SDE exclusives.