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You'll Never Walk Alone and Locked Up top chart of popular quarantine music

<span>Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

You’ll Never Walk Alone, as performed by Gerry and the Pacemakers, has topped a chart of songs experiencing a surge in popularity as UK listeners look to music for comfort and reflection during the coronavirus lockdown.

The Official Charts Company, which compiles the UK Top 40, analysed tracks that were more than five years old, and ranked those with the biggest percentage uplift, excluding anomalies such as the surge of listeners to the music of Kenny Rogers, who died last week.

As well as being a song of solidarity and unity that speaks to our current moment, You’ll Never Walk Alone – which experienced a 150% jump in streams – is also the anthem of Liverpool FC, whose fans are perhaps using it to soothe their painful limbo. The club had expected to secure this year’s Premier League title by this point in the season.

Second in the chart is a more prosaic choice: Locked Up by Akon, about being imprisoned. Don’t Stand So Close to Me by the Police rounds out the top three, having taken on a darkly humorous meaning as people are forced to physically distance themselves.

The energetic pop songs Reach by S Club 7 and Move Your Feet by Junior Senior are both in the Top 10, while more melancholy choices include another Akon song, Lonely, plus Frank Ocean’s Lost, John Lennon’s Imagine, and REM’s Everybody Hurts. The band’s apocalyptic hit It’s the End of the World as We Know It also features.

The full Top 100 – also featuring Jason Derulo’s Ridin’ Solo, the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive, Kesha’s Die Young and MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This – is available on the Official Charts website.