Born in Busan, South Korea just several days after Oasis’s Be Here Now became the fastest selling UK album of all time, Jeon Jung-Kook of the K-Pop supergroup BTS notched a similarly impressive statistic 25 years later in July 2023 when his debut solo single became the fastest song in history to surpass 1 billion streams on Spotify. (To give an idea of just how enormous an accomplishment this is, Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” took almost 10 years to achieve the same milestone.)
Soon after, as part of his promotional tour for “Seven”, Jung Kook stopped off at Radio 1 to perform in the live lounge where, as is customary, he performed his new single along with a cover of his choice. When it was trailed that the latter would be an Oasis song, most people tuning in likely would have presumed it would be one of their heavy hitters: “Don’t Look Back In Anger” or “Wonderwall” or maybe at a push “Stop Crying Your Heart Out”, which Leona Lewis covered in 2009 and turned into an X Factor audition standard (see: a then-unknown Harry Styles). But no. Jung Kook’s song of choice? The 2005 track “Let There Be Love”.
