Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's WAP is still the number one single. The Rolling Stones return to the top of the albums chart with an reissue from 1973.
Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion get a second week at the top of the singles chart. The Rolling Stones win a tight race to number one in the albums chart.
WAP, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s assault on the eardrums is the number one single for a second week. If this isn’t still the worst number one of the year by the time 2021 dawns, we are in for a real horror show some time in the next few months.
Mood by 24KGoldn and Iann Dior climbs two places to number two. Headie One, Aj Tracey and Stormzy climb to number three with Ain’t It Different. Nathan Dawe and KSI’s Lighter slips to number four. Pop Smoke and Lil Tjay’s Mood Swings is at number five.
Joel Corry and MNEK’s Head & Heart falls three places to number five. That song has been moved on to the Accelerated Chart Ratio (ACR) this week, meaning that it now needs twice as many streams as before to notch up one “sale”. It is, therefore, a sign of its continuing popularity that it remains in the top five.
Irish singer-songwriter Dermot Kennedy enters at number 22 with Giants in its tenth week in the top 100. It becomes his second most successful single after Outnumbered which reached the top ten last year. With luck, this will become his second top ten hit.
A year after winning X Factor in 2012, James Arthur’s career appeared to be heading in the same direction as many previous winners of the show. After the inevitable number one with his winner’s song, Impossible, he had a number two single followed by one other which just about reached the top twenty. However, after an absence of nearly three years, he sprung a surprise by coming back in 2016 with Say You Won’t Let Go and grabbing himself a second number one. Two more top ten singles (and a number eleven) have followed since then.
Like James Arthur, Sigala (Bruce Fielder from Norwich) started his singles career with a number one, Easy Love in 2015. He has had a further six top ten hits since then with singles featuring, inter alia, Ella Eyre, Paloma Faith and Nile Rodgers. The two of them have now joined forces on Lasting Love, a new entry at number 27. The song features a sample of MGMT’s brilliant Time To Pretend which deserved far more than its number 35 peak in 2008. Eek, is it really twelve years old already? Lasting Love is decent enough although the Time To Pretend snatches are the definite highlights.
Producers collective Internet Money enter at number 36 with Lemonade. It features Gunna, Don Toliver and Naz. Between them all they have produced a load of rubbish.
There is a rare rock hit at number 37 in the form of Obey by Bring Me The Horizon and Yungblud. It is Bring Me The Horizon’s second hit of the year (after Parasite Eve) and their third ever - Drown reached number seventeen in 2014. It is Yungblud’s first top forty hit. Unfortunately, it is awful although it does make a change from the endless combinations of Headie One, Drake and Juice Wrld.
After dropping as low as number 71 in last week’s chart, DJ Khaled and Drake’s Popstar comes storming back into the top forty at number twenty. It owes a lot of its increase in “sales” to views of a new video featuring Justin Bieber as, you’ve guessed it, a popstar. It is, of course, still terrible.
As well as Head & Heart, a number of other songs in last week’s top forty have been moved on to ACR. Having been rather lower in the chart than the Joel Corry and MNEK song, they have now dropped out. That might have been the cue for some new songs to enter in their place. However, it is more a case of allowing some other old songs to get back in to the top forty. This week sees the return of Kygo and TIna Turner’s What’s Love Got To Do With It at number 39 and Abra Cadabra’s On Deck at 40.
The clearout of some older songs also helps to make way for The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights, still sounding fabulous, to climb back up to number 21.
Monday’s chart update also suggested that Ed Sheeran’s Perfect would pop up in the top forty again. However, in subsequent updates it was much further down the chart having suddenly been put on to ACR. Naturally, conspiracy theorists rushed to suggest that the Official Charts Company (OCC) were bored with the song and chose to change its status at the stroke of a pen. Eventually, we were given an explanation.
The song had been put on to ACR at the time of its initial chart run back in 2017. When it was chosen as an official single in September, the record company requested a manual change back to the standard ratio (SCR). At the beginning of this year, having gone back on to ACR again, it was one of many songs to return to SCR as a result of an increase in streams as people switched back to streaming “normal” songs instead of Christmas tunes.
At no point this year had it suffered three successive weeks of declining streams which would have seen it back on SCR. However, there is another rule that says that a song switches permanently to ACR when it is three years old. The clock for Perfect was reset when it had its status changed in September 2017. The third anniversary of that change was on Tuesday so the change was made on that date. It is, therefore, now unlikely that Perfect will grace the top forty ever again.
This year has seen a number of close races at the top of the albums chart and this week there has been another one. As in several of the previous such weeks, record companies have deployed various tactics in trying to get their album to triumph, including opening a shop at a convenient time.
Some of the previous contests could be described as being between an established artist and young pretenders but rarely has the contrast been quite as extreme as this week’s. Twenty-one-year-old Declan McKenna,s second album was in competition with a reissue of a 1973 album by the Rolling Stones, each of whose members is over 50 years older than McKenna.
In Monday’s update Declan McKenna held a narrow lead. The general assumption was that McKenna's clear lead on streaming would see him prevail by the end of the week. As stated here before, sales - particularly of a new release - tend to be heavily weighted towards the first couple days of the chart week while streams are spread more evenly throughout the week. However, by Thursday, the Stones had taken a lead, helped in part by sales from a new Rolling Stones shop in Carnaby Street which just happened to open this week.
Goats Head Soup was the Stones’ thirteenth studio album and went straight to the top of the chart, making it their eighth number one, staying there for two weeks. Its best-known track is Angie, a number five single in the UK and an American number one.
Zeros is Declan McKenna’s second album following 2017’s What Do You Think About The Car? which reached number eleven. HIs debut was somewhat political for a first release, particularly for a singer who was just eighteen at the time. His impressive new set is less political and is a deserved success.
At the end of the week, after all sales and streams were counted, the Rolling Stones finished narrowly ahead. Their twelve number one albums have now spent a total of 47 weeks at the top of the chart. Declan McKenna has to be satisfied with a number two album and hope that his next release can go one better.
Pop Smoke’s Shoot For The Stars Aim For The Moon climbs back up to number three. Nines’ Crabs In A Bucket falls to number four after a week at number one. Taylor Swift’s Folklore is back up to number five.
Billy Ocean was born Leslie Charles in Trinidad and Tobago before his family moved to London when he was ten. He had two big hit singles in the 1970s with Love Really Hurts Without You And Red Light Spells Danger, both of which peaked at number two. He had a couple more top ten hits in the 1980s and then topped the chart in 1986 (ten years after his first hit) with When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going. His first four albums all failed to make the chart. HIs first albums chart success had to wait until 1984 when Suddenly (also the name of a rather dreary single) made the top ten. After two more top ten albums and a successful Greatest Hits set in 1989, that appeared to be it.
However, Ocean made a comeback in 1997 before going quite again for another six years. He has continued to have long quiet spells since then but is now back with a new album, One World, at number fourteen.
The release of a new Hurts album always gives me the chance to lament that they haven’t been more successful in the UK. The Manchester duo have released a string of fantastic songs such as Better THan Love, Wonderful Life, Illuminated and Sunday but their only major success was as featured artist on Clavin Harris’s Under Control which topped the chart in 2013. Their new album, Faith, once again has some fantastic songs so it is disappointing to see it entering at a rather modest number 21.
Big Sean enters at number 24 with Detroit 2. Rapper and jailbird 6ix9ine is at number 27 with Tattletales. We can hope that this is a sign that there is no longer much appetite for anything from him.
Published on: 2020-09-11 by BuzzJack.com Suedehead2 || 17361 Views
|