Could Gotye be on the verge of joining a very exclusive club of Australians who’ve had a #1 single in the United States, joining the likes of Men At Work, INXS, and Savage Garden? If all goes to plan.
His breakthrough international smash hit single, Somebody That I Used To Know, has just shot up to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and looks almost unstoppable as a with the Australian songwriter booked for a number of upcoming television appearances.
His international success comes after the Melbourne-based singer songwriter dominated Australia after winning both the J Awards and several ARIA Awards.
His team will no doubt be hoping that his forthcoming appearance on Saturday Night Live, backed up with cover version recently featured on Glee and American Idol, will help push the single onto the top of the US charts, topping off what has been a huge year for the singer.
The single has now been on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US for 13 consecutive weeks, it’s gone #1 in fifteen countries including in the UK, New Zealand, Ireland, Austria, and Poland where it stayed #1 for a record 16 weeks.
In Australia the single has gone 9x Platinum, shipping over 630,000 copies. But the real prize is the United States where the single has just earned Platinum status meaning its sold over a million copies.
And let’s not forget where it all started, the creative music video which has now been watched an impressive 140 million times on Youtube.
The success of that single has also helped propel Kimbra into the spotlight. The Melbourne-based singer must be thanking her lucky stars as she prepares to embark on an Australian tour after it came out last month she wasn’t Gotye’s original choice.
Not that she hasn’t earned her success. Not wanting to miss the chance of a lifetime to perform on a television chat show in the United States but already booked to perform at the Big Day Out, Kimbra and her team hatched an audacious plan to fly over to Los Angeles immediately after Kimbra’s set at the Melbourne Big Day Out.
They rushed to the studio to perform for four minutes live on television, and then leave immediately for the airport again the fly to Adelaide where they landed with just an hour to spare. Nice.
