Justin Bieber bags a third week at the top of the singles chart. David Gilmour has his second solo number one album.

Justin Bieber gets a third week at the top of the singles chart. Ex-Pink Floyd man David Gilmour tops the albums chart.

In another week with very few new entries in the singles chart, Justin Bieber holds on at number one. It is the third week at the top for What Do You Mean. Sigala gets a second week at number two with Easy Love.

R City and Levine climb thirteen places to number three with Locked Away. It is a strong contender for next week’s number one with the main opposition coming from Sam Smith’s song from the forthcoming James Bond film.

Calvin Harris and Disciples slip one place to number four with How Deep Is Your Love. The Weeknd’s Can’t Feel My Face stays at number five. He is due to perform the song on Graham Norton’s show tonight (Friday). In the USA this week, Can’t Feel My Face has been knocked off the number one spot by The Hills, also by The Weeknd.

And so we come to those new entries, all three of them. The highest, at number seven, is Ellie Goulding’s new single, On My Mind. It is her tenth to ten hit since Starry Eyed reached number four in 2010. Sadly, she has succumbed to the tendency to allow songs to be over-produced.

The next new entry, at number eleven, features a female singer whose achievements dwarf those of Ellie Goulding. As a member of Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé notched up fourteen top forty hits, all but two of which reached the top ten. Two of them topped the chart. As a solo artist, she has accumulated a further sixteen top ten hits, including five number ones. For now at least, she misses out on a seventeenth top ten hit as a solo artist as the featured vocalist on Naughty Boy’s Running (Lose It All). Thankfully, this song is not over-produced and Beyoncé’s vocals are more restrained than on some of her output. Perhaps surprisingly, I actually quite like it. The song also features somebody called Arrow Benjamin. I assume the name Arrow does not appear on his birth certificate.

While the official “universal release day” has now been fixed as Friday, there is no rule compelling record labels to release songs on Friday. If One Direction want to release a song on a different day, there is nothing to stop them. Of course, one possible consequence of releasing a song part way through the chart week is that its chart position may be affected. Rather than going into the top ten, it might, for example, only go to number 36. Indeed, that is exactly what has happened.

Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ monster hit Uptown Funk re-enters at number 39.

Major Lazer’s Lean On and OMI’s Cheerleader complete six months in the top forty this week. Skrillex, Diplo and Justin Bieber’s Where Are U Now has been in the chart for 23 weeks. They are all beaten by the return of Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars. Uptown Funk has now spent a total of 39 weeks in the top forty.

Once again, if you want lots of new entries, the albums chart is the place to look. And, once again, the new entries start at the very top with David Gilmour’s fourth solo album, Rattle That Lock. It is his first solo album since On An Island which also went to number one in 2006. It is safe to assume that the royalties from his work with Pink Floyd will have kept the wolf from the door in the meantime. Among the musicians performing on the album are two thirds of Crosby, Stills & Nash, Robert Wyatt, Jools Holland, Mica Paris and Brian Eno’s brother Roger. There are vocals from Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson and their son, Gabriel. There is also a voice sample from another former member of Pink Floyd, keyboardist Richard Wright who died in 2008.

Lana Del Rey enters at number two with Honeymoon, her third album if you exclude the one she recorded under her real name, Elizabeth Grant. The two previous albums both topped the chart. Among the credited co-songwriters, on a track described as an interlude, are T. S. Eliot, the poet whose name is famously an anagram of toilets, and Keefus Ciancia, whose name is an anagram of ‘e fancies UK CIA.

Next month, Cliff Richard will be celebrating his 75th birthday. To mark the occasion, another compilation has been released to add to the many previous compilations. As the title, 75 at 75 - 75 Greatest Hits, suggests, the album contains 75 songs. That obviously means that they span his whole career from the days when he was described as the British Elvis to the rather blander songs he released as he aged. There is even a new song, Golden, to attract fans who already own all or most of the other songs on the album. The album’s presence at number four takes Cliff’s total number of weeks in the top 75 albums chart (although many of those weeks will have been clocked up when the chart contained fewer than 75 albums) to 857. Only fifteen acts have spent more time in the albums chart.

Jess Glynne’s I Cry When I Laugh moves back up one place to number three. Last week’s number one album, Stereophonics’ Keep The Village Alive, falls to number five.

Since the advent of downloads, it has been fairly common for individual songs to be released part of the way through the chart week. As noted above, On Direction did so this very week. Album release dates have generally been less flexible. However, there are still exceptions to the rule. One of those occurred this week with the release on Sunday of What A Time To Be Alive by Drake and Future. Drake is beginning to make a habit of this. His solo album, If You’re reading This, It’s Too Late, was also released in the middle of the chart week. Future’s past includes the release of three albums, none of which troubled the top forty in the UK. This album lands at number six.

Cliff Richard’s presence means that David Gilmour avoids being the oldest artist in the top ten. In fact he isn’t even the second oldest. That accolade belongs to Rolling Stone, Keith Richards. While Gilmour has yet to celebrate his 70th birthday, Richards has somehow managed to survive to the age of 71 despite consuming prodigious amounts of alcohol and other, less legal, substances. Like Gilmour, his solo releases have been few and far between. Crosseyed Heart is only his third solo album, and the first for 23 years. The first two albums didn’t exactly take the charts by storm. Release number three does rather better. It is a new entry at number seven.

Ed Sheeran’s × remains in the top ten for a 66th week. However, Sam Smith’s run finally comes to an end after 70 weeks, a record run for a debut album. The record cannot be beaten until early 2017 at the very earliest.

Floridian rock band Shinedown’s second and third albums had titles which could have caused confusion. In 2005, they released Us And Them, the title of a Pink Floyd song. They followed that three years later with The Sound Of Madness which could have been a compilation by the Camden band often known as the Nutty Boys. Four years after that, they found the way to Amaryllis. With jokes like that last one, their new album, Threat To Survival could be a reference to the future of this commentary. The album enters at number thirteen, surpassing their previous peak of number eighteen.

As well as Lana Del Rey, two other female singers to have enjoyed considerable success in the last few years have new albums in the chart this week. Gabrielle Aplin enters at number fourteen with her second album, Light Up The Dark. Her 2013 debut, English Rain, reached number two. Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen is at number 21 with her third album, Emotion. As is often the case with contemporary singer-songwriters, the list of co-writers is rather long. They include Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij and, as it is a legal requirement, Sia Furler.

For his fifteenth studio album, American singer-songwriter Ryan Adams has done something a little different. Not only is 1989 an album of cover versions, it is a full remake of Taylor Swift’s album of the same name. It enters at number 19 to give him a seventh to forty album in the UK. The original version of the album is two places higher.

English folk singer David Rhodes, recording simply as Rhodes or even RHODES, enters at number 24 with his debut album, Wishes. Chris Cornell, lea vocalist with rock band Soundgarden, enters at number 37 with his fourth solo studio album, Higher Truth.

In 1978, Douglas Adams could be said to have foreseen the coming of the internet and tablet computers when he wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy for Radio 4. For those unfamiliar with one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century, the guide was an electronic guidebook to the galaxy. It’s success was often attributed to the fact that it had the words Don’t Panic in large, friendly letters on the cover. If Section Boyz album entitled Don’t Panic had entered at number 42, that would have delighted many Hitchhiker’s Guide fans, although it would have been a bit of an issue for anyone whose commentary focuses on the top forty. In the event, it enters at number 36, so we’re OK. Who are Section Boyz? No idea.

This week’s re-entries see Rudimental’s Home back at number 23, Elton John’s 2007 Definitive Hits Collection, Rocket Man, at number 35 and Jack Savoretti’s Written In Scars at number 22.