A BRIDGE OVER YOU
by LEWISHAM & GREENWICH NHS

The Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Choir had previously appeared on the first series of Gareth Malone's BBC Two show The Choir: Sing While You Work, in a competition between workplace choirs, in 2012. The choir first released their mash-up of Coldplay’s Fix You and Simon & Garfunkel’s 1970 UK Official Singles Chart Number 1 Bridge Over Troubled Water in 2013, but it failed to do very much at the time selling only 5000 copies.

However, in 2015 doctors Katie Rogerson and Harriet Nerva launched a social media campaign to make the single to Number 1. They knocked off Justin Bieber’s Love Yourself from the top, thanks mainly to him encouraging his followers to download the song with a link, giving the choir a 30,000 sales advantage, and making it 2015’s UK Official Singles Christmas Chart Number 1 with 127,000 sales overall for one week before Bieber replaced it. The song’s proceeds were split between causes including Carers UK and the charity Mind.