The One & Only – The Best of Chesney Hawkes

If a dopamine hit in 2024 is a red dot in your Instagram notifications, for a period in the early nineties that sense of anticipation took the form of a sound: five seconds of rising guitar feedback followed by a cymbal stab heralding the arrival of flaxen-haired pop cherub Chesney Hawkes and his unmistakable, unfakeable, unshakeable declaration of teen agency: “I aaaam the one and only!”

The leather sheen is apt, matched only by the song’s high-gloss production, for Chesney’s radio-friendly pop-rock colossus The One & Only is the sound of pulling on a leather jacket for the first time aged fourteen. Featured in the film Buddy’s Song, it hit no. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1991. In his native UK it topped the chart, stayed there for five weeks and then promptly disappeared, seemingly along with Hawkes himself.

What little money Hawkes made from the recording of the song was quickly blown on sports cars for his family, while the publishing income went to sole writer Nik Kershaw, who bought two houses with the proceeds and by his own admission in a 2017 Guardian interview “sat in an armchair sipping merlot while it flew up the charts.”

It’s tempting to scoff at one-hit wonders, especially ones with song titles as prescient as The One & Only. In doing so we get to enjoy the schadenfreude of confining an artist to the where-are-they-now files, eternally and internally screaming “Don’t you know who I was!” at the latest customer to pass through their supermarket checkout.

But pop yourself over to Chesney’s Instagram account and you’ll find an artist in his fifties living his best life, still touring and recording (indeed getting naked in the video for his new single Get A Hold of Yourself) and heartwarmingly still best pals with Nik Kershaw. Life for Chesney has worked out handsomely and wholesomely well.

In maths, any number divided by infinity is zero. Put another way, one is infinitely higher than none. Chesney might be the embodiment of this principle in pop, having embraced the idea that one hit is way more than most artists ever get a shot at, and making the most of it. And who knows, maybe The One & Only won’t be the one and only after all …