will.i.am has his first number one single as a solo artist and Linkin Park have their third number one album

will.i.am has his first solo number one single and Linkin Park win a close battle to top the albums chart.

will.i.am goes straight to the top of the chart with his latest solo single. It is the 13th top 40 hit for him as a named artist although only the fifth on which he has been the lead artist. He has featured on five number ones as a Black Eyed Pea as well as being the featured artist on Usher’s OMG in 2010. The Black Eyed Peas’ first number one single, in 2003, was Where Is The Love? Now he sort of answers that question with This Is Love. it is a more appropriate answer to the question Is This Love which has been posed by various people, most recently Aiden Grimshaw last month or Howard Jones’ question What Is Love? The song features Dutch singer Eva Simons who was also the featured vocalist on Afrojack’s Take Over Control in late 2010. will.i.am was recently a guest on Graham Norton’s chat show. One of his fellow guests was the wonderful Miriam Margolyes. It provided a good example of how a chat show can work well even if two of the guests have only the vaguest idea who the other one is.

Maroon 5 and Wiz Khalifa drop to number two after a single week at the top. It is the fifth successive number one not to get a second week at the summit despite most of them selling over 100,000 copies in their first week.

At the beginning of last year Chris Brown had not had a top ten hit for 2 1/2 years and his well-publicised brush with the law led many people to believe he would never make the upper reaches of the chart again. However he has proved them very wrong and this week he gets his sixth top ten hit since then and his tenth in total as Don’t Wake Me Up (a very appropriate title) enters at number three.

Flo Rida slips to number four and Cheryl falls three places to number five.

Taio Cruz enters at number 12 with his latest dirge There She Goes. It is the third - and easily the worst - song of that title to reach the top 40 and, so far, they have all peaked in the same region of the chart. The La’s finest hour came when their song There She Goes reached number 13 in late 1990, nearly two years after it was first released. Singer John Power went on to have seven top ten hits with Cast. In 1999 Sixpence None The Richer followed their best known hit Kiss Me with There She Goes which peaked at number 14.

With just a few weeks to go various Olympic-themed musical offerings are on the way. Tomorrow (Monday) Blur will be using Twitter to launch two new songs which will be played at the Olympic closing concert, Elbow have written the theme tune for the BBC’s coverage and we can expect yet another re-release for Heather Small’s Proud. In the albums market a new edition of the Chariots Of Fire soundtrack will be released at the end of the month. This week saw the first actual release with Muse making Survival (chosen as the official Olympic song) available on Tuesday evening. Muse haven’t done subtle for a while now and they haven’t started here. The words “typically understated modest little ditty from Muse” don’t really apply. It is a new entry at number 27 and is the first ever top 40 hit to contain the word survival although Nine Inch Nails did make the top 40 with a song called Survivalism.

Last weekend would normally have been Glastonbury weekend but this year it is taking a break. As a result the Isle Of Wight festival was held two weeks later than normal and Radio 1 organised their biggest ever weekend event in Hackney. That has helped to boost the sales of some of the acts who appeared. Nicki Minaj enters at number 34 with Pound The Alarm. It is her 11th top 40 hit in under two years.

One of the acts biggest performing at Hackney was Jay-Z who was joined on stage by Kanye West. As a result two songs from their Watch The Throne album (which climbs 13 places to number seven this week) enter the top 40. Niggas In Paris returns at number 18 and the equally atrocious No Church In The Wild is a new entry at number 37. That song also features Frank Ocean who makes his chart debut. He finished second in the BBC Sound Of 2012 list and is not related to Billy Ocean who had a few hits in the mid 1970s. Anyone who has been watching the Top Of The Pops repeats will have noticed that he liked large collars.

Katy Perry climbs two places to number ten with Wide Awake. It is the seventh song from Teenage Dream to reach the top ten with The One That Got Away being the appropriately titled exception. After spending the last six weeks bobbing about between numbers 16 and 18 Labrinth moves up to a new peak of number 13 with Express Yourself. A labyrinthine chart run indeed.

David Guetta and Sia’s Titanium continues to climb back up the chart in its 26th week in the top 40. Gotye and Kimbra just hold on to their top 20 place with Somebody That I Used To Know (the best selling song of the year so far at the half-way point) notching up its 25th top 40 week. Sia’s other current hit Wild Ones (with Flo Rida) has been around for 21 weeks and Nicki Minaj’s Starships reaches the 20 week mark this week.

The race for the number one album always seemed likely to be a two-horse race. Both Linkin Park and Maroon 5 were hoping for a third chart-topping album. Linkin Park led at the start of the week but there was always a suspicion that their sales would be more loaded towards the start of the week than Maroon 5’s sales. However the Californian rock band prevailed and Living Things follows Meteora (2003) and Minutes To Midnight (2007) in going straight to the top of the chart. All five of their studio albums (and a remix album) have reached the top ten.

Maroon 5’s debut album Songs About Jane failed to take the world by storm when it was released in June 2002. It eventually climbed into the top 40 in its second week in the chart in February 2004 after Harder To Breathe gave them their first hit single and dropped out again two weeks later having got no higher than number 30. Subsequent singles This Love and She Will Be Loved both reached the top ten and that - along with critical acclaim - helped the album return to the charts. It finally reached number one in August 2004 a full two years after release. The second studio album It Won’t Be Soon Before Long wasn’t released until May 2007 but it went straight to the top of the chart. The third album Hands All went to number six in September 2010 but soon dropped out of the chart and it looked like they may have passed their sell-by date. However, last year Moves Like Jagger became a massive hit (selling well over a million copies) and became one of the unluckiest number twos of all time spending seven weeks in the runner-up spot behind six different number ones. Their new album Overexposed has already given them their first number one single but has fallen just short of top spot in the albums chart as a new entry at number two.

Ed Sheeran benefits from his Hackney appearance to move back up to number three. Last week’s number one from Justin Bieber drops to number four and Emeli Sande is down one place at number five.

Flo Rida has appeared on four number one singles but his albums chart performance is rather more modest. Mail On Sunday (2008) got no higher than number 29 while Roots (2009) peaked at number five. His new album Wild Ones does not look set to improve on that record - it enters at number eight.

There is a new entry at number 27 for 100%, the debut solo album from Ginger Wildheart, the former frontman of The Wildhearts. The album was financed with the help of advance orders from fans. He told Music Week “This chart entry marks a historic change in the way that bands and artists can release music direct to their fans, afford quality production values and actually make a living too. For too many years labels have been using musicians as fodder for developing their own marketing techniques, usually at the expense of the players themselves. Musicians deserve to be paid like everyone else, and the only people who truly realise this, apart from the musicians themselves, are the fans. They want us to keep making music. This model means we all get to win.” The Wildhearts had two top 40 albums in the mid 1990s.

The name Netsky sounds a bit like a Russian version of the internet but is actually the pseudonym chosen by Belgian drum and bass producer Boris Daenen and refers to a computer virus of the same name. He has remixed versions of songs by artists such as Plan B, Underworld and Jessie J (Nobody’s Perfect). As the title suggests 2 is his second album following 2010’s Netsky which failed to chart. The new album has fared rather better and is a new entry at number 29.

There will always be bands who have a brief period of success before dropping out of the limelight but who continue to plod along releasing new material from time to time. One of those acts is Brighton based The Levellers. Their heyday was the early to mid 1990s when they enjoyed a run of hit singles and three hit albums including a number one with Zeitgeist although their best known songs are from 1991’s Levelling The Land which stalled at number 14. Their new album Static On The Airwaves is a new entry at number 36. It is released on the On The Fiddle label which is not a subsidiary of Barclays Bank. The Levellers are regulars on the festival circuit and are playing at the Hop Farm Festival today. However good their set is - and it will probably be very good - it will be completely overshadowed by tonight’s headliners Suede.

There are a number of re-entries, mostly from acts who performed at the Radio 1 shindig. fun. are back at number 28, Rizzle Kicks re-enter at number 33 and Labrinth returns at number 36.

The publicity surrounding their triumphant return to the live stage after re-forming sees The Best Of The Stone Roses climb 17 places to number 21. A look at the set list serves as a reminder of just how good they were at their peak. They have been opening with I Wanna Be Adored and closing the set with I Am The Resurrection. Classics such as Fools Gold, Ten Storey Love Song and Waterfall should have helped those lucky enough to get a ticket to enjoy their night despite the weather being rather poor even by Manchester standards.