The world of *music promotion is filled with goals, aims and rewards depending on the size and ambition of the musician, with so many circumstances becoming the difference between a successful, lengthy and notable career and one that ends before it begins.

Given that the UK Number One Single is one of the biggest single achievements a particular artist can garner, it is notable how many artists have reached the coveted top spot and promptly disappeared from the music landscape, either due to being a novelty or a sleeper hit.

Telly Savalas

Best known in the UK for playing Ernst Stavro Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as well as the eponymous Kojak, Telly Savalas has a perfect voice for spoken word, and so in 1975, he followed in the footsteps of William Shatner and released a spoken word album.

A cover of the *Bread song If surprisingly went to number one as a result.

Baz Luhrmann

This one is particularly complicated and exactly how the director of Romeo + Juliet had a number one single with *a spoken word song he neither wrote the article/lyrics for nor narrated himself.

In June 1997, Mary Schich penned a column commonly known as “Wear Sunscreen”, although its full title is “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young”.

It became an early viral sensation, in part because the hypothetical commencement speech was described incorrectly as being by Kurt Vonnegut, who later noted he wished he had.

This email was sent to Anton Monsted, who was working with Baz Lurhmann on an ambient remix of the dance song Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good).

It was released in *1997 and with the help of Chris Moyles, A DJ for BBC Radio One, it went to number one in the UK.

3 of a Kind

The garage trio 3 of a Kind might be the platonic ideal of a one-hit-wonder. The three met the day they recorded Babycakes, the song went straight to number one by virtue of industrial-strength catchiness in 2004 before disappearing from the music world completely without a follow-up.