(Credits: Far Out)
Mon 30 June 2025 5:00, UK
Kraftwerk. Rammstein. Scorpions. Nena. For a country with a… shall we say complicated relationship with Germany, there have actually been a surprising number of German acts to become mainstream concerns in the UK. Of course, it helps that Germany‘s pop scene was shaped by British imports to West Germany in the 1960s, which in turn were shaped by American rock ‘n’ roll records. Thus, there’s slightly less of a culture shock than in countries like France and Spain, with more of a history of popular music to draw upon.
Yet still, it feels strange, right? Just take a cursory listen to the crowd of any England football match and you’ll find a group pretty staunchly opposed to our Teutonic comrades. That said, that’ll almost certainly be a crowd pissed up on German beer, which just goes to show how deep our so-called “rivalry” actually goes. For the most part, though, German music is almost something of a running joke.
A tired, outdated one that ignores the massive debts we owe that country for their hand in creating dance and techno music. However, jokes being tired and outdated doesn’t stop them from still absolutely banging in mainstream English culture. This is a country that has spent 14 years and counting having its ribs firmly tickled by Mrs. Brown’s Boys.
What we should remember is that a bunch of our most beloved pop hits have come from Germany. Lou Bega, he of ‘Mambo No. 5’. Felix Jaehn, who turned OMI’s ‘Cheerleader’ into a global smash hit. Hell, even Milli Vanilli were massive before everything fell apart for them. However, none of them have the biggest selling German single on the UK pop charts. The source of that might surprise all but the most studious of pop nerds.
What is the best-selling German single in UK Chart history?
As if to fly directly in the face of anyone still dumb enough to believe that Germany is a nation of stiff, humourless, charisma vacuums, one of the most commercially succesful acts to ever come from that country is still Boney M. One of the great disco acts of the era, who were able to take the German lineage of electronic music to make some of the most fun, frothy and stylish dance-pop of their era.
According to the Official Charts Company, the band has sold over 100 million records worldwide, boosted by a fistful of colossal hit singles. Their 1978 take on The Melodians’ ‘Rivers of Babylon’ makes up a pretty sizeable chunk of those sales, too, as to this day, it’s still the most successful single by a German act in the UK.
However, it wasn’t just the A-Side that made this happen. After ‘Rivers of Babylon’ spent five weeks atop the UK singles chart on its own merit, the single began a steady climb down the charts. What goes up, must come down after all. However, just as it was about to drop out of the top 20, something strange happened. DJs began playing the single’s B-side ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’.
The B-side was so phenomenal that it powered the single all the way back up to number 2, adding a few thousand more sales to a single that was all but dead on arrival. Fitting staying power for the biggest-selling German single in the history of the UK charts.
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