Suedehead2

Same as the men, except that the women actually managed to win one.

Looks like I might have to watch the final with a commentary in French

2-1 to the Engerland

Yet a 19-year-old can be put in charge of a £2bn budget? Oh, BTW, do you have a source for your assertion?

Yet the party thinks 16- and 17-year olds shouldn't be able to vote.

Yes!

Badenoch has appointed a shadow minister for policy renewal and development. In other words, there is a shadow minister who isn't actually shadowing anyone.

I played it a lot when it came out, but hadn't listened to the whole album for ages. I ;listened to it this afternoon and it still sounded great. One of many favourite gigs was MGMT on my 50th birthday in 2010.

Easy choice.

Peter Gabriel - No Self Control Siouxsie And The Banshees - Christine Yellow Magic Orchestra - Computer Game ('Theme From The Invaders')/Firecracker Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart Kate Bush - Babooshka Worst Teena Marie - Behind The Groove The Detroit Spinners - Cupid/I've Loved You For A Long Time The Detroit Spinners - Body Language Tie-break - It's impossible to choose, so I will have to abstain.

This week's ramblings are now available from the Blogs page and the Forums index page. Better late than never!

MK and Chrystal’s single Dior spends a second week at number one. Lewis Capaldi's Survive therefore remains the only 2025 number one to spend just seven days at the top. Only two other songs have been single-week number ones in the last twelve months. Sabrina Carpenter’s Manchild remains at number two. She has accumulated a total of fourteen weeks at number two to add to her 23 weeks at number one in the singles chart giving her a total of almost nine months in the top two since June last year. Calvin Harris and Clementine Douglas climb three places to number three with Blessings. It is Harris’s 25th top five hit and Douglas’s first. Her first chart hit was as a featured artist on an MK song. Justin Bieber sprang a surprise last week by releasing a new album. Surprise album releases are always a risk. Part of the risk is that they will come without any single releases to build up momentum before the album is released. Predictably, three songs from the album (the most allowed in the chart by one artist under current rules) are in the top forty. Unusually though, one of them is much higher than the other two. That song is Daisies which is a new entry at number four. Yukon is at number 32, one place ahead of All I Can Take. Bieber has now had 60 top forty singles, 28 of them reaching the top ten. The charting songs just happen to be the first three tracks on the album. The fact that third track Yukon is not very good (the other two are decent enough) perhaps put casual listeners off hearing any more of it. Ed Sheeran’s Sapphire climbs four places to a new peak at number five. There is just one other new entry to report. Sadly, it’s more K-Pop, this time in the form of a new single from Blackpink. Jump is their first single for two years and it is a new entry at number eighteen. Their only single to chart higher was a collaboration with Lady Gaga which reached number seventeen. Still on the subject of K-Pop, Golden from the soundtrack of a film about it climbs into the top ten at number nine. After three weeks of declining streams, two songs with long runs in the top ten have gone on to the Accelerated Chart Ratio (ACR). With the value of their streams now halved, the songs have been banished from the upper tier. Ravyn Lenae’s Love Me Not has crashed nineteen places to number 22 after thirteen weeks in the top ten. Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club slums 25 places to number 30 after a massive 22 weeks in the top ten. Alex Warren’s thirteen-week number one Ordinary has been on ACR for four weeks but is still picking up enough streams to remain in the top ten. In the music industry the Isle Of Wight is generally better known for its festival than for its musicians. The only bands of note from the island are Level 42 and, more recently, Wet Leg. The latter band topped the chart in 2022 with their eponymous debut album. Now they have done so again with their second set Moisturizer. While I haven’t yet heard the whole album, I have found the tracks I’ve heard so far rather disappointing. There are still three Oasis albums in the top five and they all fall one place this week. The Time Flies compilation is now at number two, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory is at three and debut album Definitely Maybe is at five.The band has now spent 162 weeks in the top ten of the albums chart and 1,001 weeks in the top forty. If anyone has a list of artists with 1,000 or more weeks in the top forty albums, perhaps they would like to share it with us. Completing the top five is the aforementioned album by Justin Bieber, Swag, at number four. It is his seventh top ten album. Those albums have spent a total of 55 weeks in the top ten. After a short absence, the person who writes the Official Chart Company’s albums chart summary has chosen to remind us of his or her fondness of the word multihyphenate. This time s/he has used it to describe Burna Boy. As in the past, its use is a bit of a stretch as all his listed talents are in the music industry. A true multihyphenate might for example, be a successful songwriter / performer as well as being an acclaimed actor and writing as best-selling novel. Anyway, Burna Boy is at number six with No Sign Of Weakness. While she has been absent from the singles chart for some time, Amy McDonald is still capable of making it into the albums chart. The Scottish singer has reached the top ten with every studio album and she continues that run with Is This What You’ve Been Waiting For at number eight. We have heard a lot recently about how Teddy Swims. However, Scottish DJ and producer Joshua Mainnie would like to inform us that Barry Can’t Swim. Loner, his second studio album under that moniker, is at number ten. It will already have become clear to regular readers that Sabrina Carpenter’s Short ‘n’ Sweet has dropped out of the top five after a record-breaking 46 weeks. In fact, the number of high new entries and the endurance of three Oasis albums means that it has dropped out of the top ten. It stands at number eleven this week. There are two other new entries in the top forty. Let God Sort Em Out, a collaboration between Clipse, Pusha T and Malice, is at number sixteen. Californian singer-songwriter Giveon is at number 38 with Beloved. Now that the school holiday has begun, I will be heading for France next week to enjoy some sunshine (I hope). Therefore, for the next four weeks, Popchartfreak will be delivering his alternative chart commentary.

Today has been the last day of term which meant a little get-together on the school field. Having enjoyed some grape juice, I will be delaying the chart commentary until tomorrow. Sorry for the delay.

Even if every 16- and 17-year-old in a constituency voted for the same party, it would only make a difference in a very small number of seats. The hope has to be that schools and colleges encourage their students to register and to vote. Most people who vote in the first election after they are eligible to do so continue to vote in subsequent elections. Most people who don't bother the first time continue not voting. Anything that incerases participation should be encouraged (within reason).

It's hilarious that Reform think 16- and 17-year-olds are too young to vote, but also think an 18-year-old is old enough to run a County Council with a budget of hundreds of millions of pounds.

Martha and the Muffins - Echo Beach Typically Tropical - Barbados

Did you say anything similar when Johnson did the same thing against MPs who rebelled once?

Oops, that's what I meant to type. Apologies to them.

Dave Cousins, singer with The Strawbs, has died aged 80. Can we have Part Of The Union in the RIP slot?

Best Blondie - Call Me Sky - Toccata Kate Bush - Breathing Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Messages The Cure - A Forest Lots of great songs missed the cut Worst The Four Bucketeers - The Bucket Of Water Song Lipps Inc - Funky Town The Nolans - Don't Make Waves

This week's meanderings can be found from the Blogs section or the Forums index page.

Regular readers will know, or will have guessed, that I write at least some of a week’s commentary before the chart is unveiled on Friday. In particular, I might write about the number ones in one or both charts. If the race is close, I have two main choices. I can write two alternative versions. When the chart was announced on a Sunday (and that last happened ten years ago), I would often write two alternative versions. That has become more difficult with the chart being unveiled on a weekday. My tactic now tends to be a little different. I can write paragraphs about each of the contenders, including the significance of each of them getting to number one. Then, when the final outcome is announced on Radio 1, I can just write a short paragraph saying what has happened. That strategy works reasonably well when there are two contenders for number one. It becomes rather more awkward when there are four. That made things difficult this week when the top four were separated by only around 2,000 sales. Clearly, I am not going to write 24 different versions to allow for each possible permutation. So, let’s stick with the other alternative. One of the contenders, although it was in third place on Monday, was last week’s number one, Lewis Capaldi’s Survive. He spent seven weeks at number one with Someone You Loved, but each of his four subsequent chart-toppers spent just a week each at number one. By Wednesday’s update, it looked very likely that Survive would be a fifth seven-day wonder as it had fallen to number four. The song in pole position on both Monday and Wednesday was last week’s number two, Dior by MK featuring Chrystal. If it finished the week still at the top of the pile, it would be a first number one for both artists. This would be a particularly impressive achievement for MK whose first chart entry came in 1995, although he didn’t reach the top forty until the same song, Always, reached number twelve. Also in contention was Sabrina Carpenter’s Manchild. Two of her three number one singles last year had two spells at number one in their chart run, and all three spent at least four weeks at the top. Two of those songs were at numbers one and two last week. Manchild’s performance to date, then, is modest by comparison. The fourth possibility has spent nineteen weeks in the top forty so far, more than the other three combined. Ravyn Lenae’s Love me Not has spent four weeks at number two, but by last week it was at number four. Could it finally climb to the top in its twentieth week in the top forty? So, what happened? MK duly gets that first number one in a thirty-year chart career as Dior climbs three places to the top. Sabrina Carpenter climbs to number two with Manchild. Ravyn Lenae spends its twentieth week in the top forty at number three. Lewis Capaldi gets another seven-day number one as Survive drops to number four. Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club remains tethered at number five. It’s just as well there was an exciting contest at the top of the chart as there is a distinct lack of brand new songs in the top forty. To make it even more boring, the sole brand new song is the 97th top forty hit from Drake, What Did I Miss? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I missed a large part of the “song” as I couldn’t bear it any longer. It is at number 27. Last week’s list of new album releases was very short. A cunning record company could have looked at the list and changed the release date for one of their relatively unknown artists in the hope that they would bag the number one. However, none of them did so. That has left us with a top four comprising three albums from the same band and an album that has taken up permanent residence in the top five. The final outcome highlighted one of the issues many people have with the way streams contribute to the albums chart. A single stream of a song can contribute to three different chart entries. It contributes to the song’s standing in the singles chart, the studio album on which it appeared (if any), and a Greatest Hits-type album (if any). In the wake of their first gigs since their acrimonious split, it is not surprising that the most-streamed Oasis songs are from their first two albums, and that many of those songs also appear on their Time Flies compilation released in 2010. The track listing of Time Flies is heavily biased towards those two albums, meaning that streams of that whole album will contribute significantly towards both those parent albums and Time Flies. That helps to explain why Time Flies is the most popular Oasis album in the chart this week and it has gone all the way to the top. It went to number one when it was released. Fifteen years later, it finally gets a second week at the top. Their debut album Definitely Maybe clocked up its 600th week in the full chart (top 100) last week. Like Time Flies, it only spent one week at the top when it was released. That album had to wait thirty years for a second week at the top last year. It is at number four this week. Oasis’s biggest album in chart terms is their second set (What’s The Story) Morning Glory. Once again, it initially topped the chart for one week. However, it went on to spend a total of ten weeks at number one between its debut in October 1995 and March the following year. It has spent104 more weeks (two years) in the chart than Definitely maybe. Returning, briefly, to the singles chart, note that I specifically referred to brand new songs. There is another new entry, but it isn’t a new song. Acquiesce by Oasis, the song in question, was originally the b-side of Some Might Say, the band’s first number one single. As with many Oasis b-side, it could easily have been a single in its own right but only appeared on an album when they released Masterplan, a collection of b-sides. In their comeback shows it has been the second song in their set, following the predictable opening song Hello. As one of thew few songs where the Gallagher brothers share the lead vocals, it was a logical choice to be part of the set opening. It now makes its chart debut at number seventeen. It is the band’s 27th top forty hit. The song was certified platinum (300,000 “sales“) just three months ago. Now it leaves the list of songs that have been certified platinum without ever making the top forty. Thanks to DanielCarey at Buzzjack for that information. Two other Oasis tracks return to the top forty, and they are both higher than the Drake new entry. Justice! Live Forever became Oasis’s first top ten hit when it reached number ten in 1994. Following the announcement of new dates last year, it returned to the top forty at a nwe peak of number eight. It is back again at number nineteen. Another Oasis number one, Don’t Look Back In Anger returned to the chart in 2017 when it became an unofficial Manchester anthem following the terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert in the city. It was also one of the songs that returned last year and now returns at number eighteen. Sabrina Carpenter prevents Oasis filling up the whole to three. Her Short ‘n’ Sweet album is at number three. Ed Sheeran’s Mathematics Tour Collection is at number five. As a proud pedant, I regard a self-titled album to be one where the artist has chosen the title rather than leaving it for someone else to do. An album that sheares its name with that of the artist is eponymous. However, Kate Tempest's new album is literally self-titled. That is what it is called. It is this week’s sole new entry at number 25. This week’s anniversary edition is of Hard-Fi’s 2005 debut Stars Of CCTV. The album originally went to number one, as did its successor Once Upon A Time In The West. Sadly, they released just one more album (which reached number nine) before splitting up. The new edition is at number eighteen.

And they're back to four MPs. They have managed to lose 40% of their original MPs in just one year. Reform MP James McMurdock loses whip over business allegations, party says - BBC News

The first run for Killing Me Softly lasted four weeks. Therefore, it was ABBBBAB. Of course, The Fugees' version of Killing Me Softly should be forgotten in favour of the vastly superior Roberta Flack version.

Scotland only uses the Alternative Vote for byelections when there is only one seat being contested. Otherwise, they use the Single Transferable Vote which has always been my preferred voting system. They are both preferential systems but STV is proportional, AV isn't.