The Million Sellers: Leona Lewis' Bleeding Love

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Official Singles Chart, Leona Lewis chats OfficialCharts.com about her million selling single Bleeding Love.

There are only 123 million selling singles in the 60 years of the Official Singles Chart, and Leona Lewis’ Bleeding Love is part of this very elite club.

After winning Series 3 of the X Factor in 2006, Leona hit Number 1 on the Official Singles Chart with A Moment Like This, which had also been a hit in the US for American Idol’s inaugural winner, Kelly Clarkson. And, not only did it take the coveted Christmas Number 1 spot, it also became the then fastest selling single by a female artist in Official Charts history.

With Simon Cowell’s US colleague, chairman of RCA Records, Clive Davis, likening Leona to a “young Whitney Houston” (as the man who discovered the I’m Every Woman star, he should know), her next single needed to be something pretty special indeed.

Penned by OneRepublic vocalist Ryan Tedder (who had just topped the US charts with his band’s single, Apologize) and US singer/songwriter Jesse McCartney, Leona debuted Bleeding Love live on X Factor on October 20, 2007. A week later, and it went straight in at Number 1 on the Official Singles Chart, selling nearly 220,000 copies in its first week on sale. Leona Lewis had become the first X Factor contestant to score two consecutive Number 1 singles, and Bleeding Love continued to top the chart for a further six weeks. By the end of 2007, it had officially become the biggest selling track of the year.

Bleeding Love has now sold over 1.04 million copies in the UK alone, and Simon Cowell has credited Leona with “saving the X Factor.”

Watch our interview with Leona below:

The full list of the UK’s 123 million selling singles, and the stories behind them, feature in a new Official Charts Company book, entitled The Million Sellers which is published by Omnibus Press (you can purchase it online from Amazon here, or get the Kindle edition here.