Chesney Hawkes is a British singer who became, almost overnight, one of the most famous one-hit wonders in UK pop history. "The One and Only", released in 1991 and written by Nik Kershaw, is a bright, anthemic pop-rock song of self-belief, featured in the film Buddy's Song, and it shot to number one in the UK and charted internationally when Hawkes was still a teenager.
Despite that huge start, he was never able to land another hit on anything like the same scale, and his name became almost synonymous with the one-hit-wonder phenomenon itself.
On streaming, "The One and Only" sits near 89 million plays, while his next most-streamed track trails at around one million. That sends the ratio above 60, far past our 5.0 line.
By our measure Chesney Hawkes is a certified one-hit wonder of the very starkest kind. His catalogue, on the numbers, is essentially one soaring anthem of identity, a song so enormous and so total in its dominance that it has come to define not only his career but the very idea of the single, inescapable hit.