This week's Official UK Singles Chart

This week's Official UK Albums Chart

 

Asked to pick the two biggest superstars in world dance music at present, practically everyone will give the same two names. Tim 'Avicii' Bergling from Sweden and France's David Guetta - two men whose mere presence at the controls of a piece of music is enough to guarantee packed dancefloors and worldwide sales in the millions. It, therefore, goes without saying that the prospect of a single featuring the work of both is an utterly mouthwatering one.

Well, cease the dribbling, because here it is. Although Lovers On The Sun carries an artist credit for David Guetta alone, Avicii's presence on co-production duties is much in evidence on the track, the song a delicious combination of both the Frenchman's knack for an instantly memorable melody and the mid-song euphoric breakdown which is now his Swedish counterpart's calling card. The first single from a forthcoming new Guetta album, the track has already been wowing audiences across the continent and now after the now requisite idiotic British label delays finally arrives on UK shores and flies with consummate ease to the very top of the Official UK Singles chart.

From being one of only a handful of Frenchmen ever to top the British charts, Guetta is now by some distance the most successful. Lovers On The Sun is his fifth Number One hit single as a lead artist, the first since acknowledged classic Titanium hit the top in early 2012. His total of chart-toppers swells to seven when counting both Flo Rida's Club Can't Handle Me on which he had secondary billing and also the Black Eyed Peas' I Gotta Feeling for which he was not credited but widely acknowledged as the production genius behind the global smash hit. Lovers On The Sun gifts a first-ever chart credit to hotly tipped American singer-songwriter Sam Martin who supplies the vocals and can be presumed to have contributed much of the lyrics to the spaghetti western-inspired club anthem. [Did this ever get a full video made for it? There's only the lyrics one on YouTube now].

Whilst the race for the top of the charts turned out to be pretty much clear-cut, throughout last week this was by no means a certainty, thanks to the fact that Monday saw the surprise release of what became the most talked-about single of the week. The latest stage in her own coronation as one of the biggest female stars on the planet, Taylor Swift's Shake It Off raced quickly into chart contention the moment it hit the shops, moving ahead of the Guetta track on the hourly live charts by midweek only to concede second place back again by the weekend. To perhaps some surprise the single only registers a first week placing of Number 4, the anomaly naturally down to the way streaming performance of new singles is often a beat behind that of its sales. Whilst Shake It Off was indeed the second biggest-selling download of the week, it spent most of the week unavailable to stream - an omission which cost it badly in comparison to the Nico & Vinz and Magic! singles which beat it into the Top 3 on the full singles chart. Note however that the sales lead of Lovers On The Sun was so great that its streaming points were all but irrelevant this week, the track no more than the 43rd most streamed track of the week. Taylor Swift will, therefore, have to wait for now for a third Top 3 hit to follow Love Story and I Knew You Were Trouble.

Already available to stream for the past fortnight, the full sales release of another Euro dance hit My Head Is Jungle by Wankelmut & Emma Louise helps propel it to a Number 5 'entry' this week, although the single technically registers a 185 place climb with its streams helping it to a low-level position on the full Top 200 chart last week. Deciding what counts as a canonical chart position is an open question amongst chart fans at present, with Music Week carrying the full printed chart to 75 places as it has done since 1978, but the Official Charts Company themselves presenting the singles chart as a Top 100 each week. For now, however, their online archives range from historic Top 10s to more recent Top 40 charts [that would shortly change when they launched the new site containing the full archive for the first time], meaning that the most complete formal record of the singles chart is indeed Music Week's printed Top 75. All this is of course to circle around the point that My Head Is A Jungle is but the first of two club hits to reach the UK charts over the next few weeks featuring artist credits which sound unfortunately rather ruder to British ears than they are supposed to.

A busy Top 10 is rounded off by the fourth new arrival of the week, former X Factor stars Union J who launch their forthcoming second album with Tonight (We Live Forever) which becomes their third Top 10 hit single in a row, albeit one which is unlikely to improve on the rather woeful chart performances of its predecessors which dipped 6-15 and 8-25 in their second weeks.

Ed Sheeran continues to entertainingly compete against himself as far as singles are concerned. 'Official' second single Don't hauls itself into the Top 10 for the very first time with a 11-8 rise, but hard on its heels and with mainstream airplay increasing all the time is the intensely beautiful Thinking Out Loud which climbs 16-13 as a big selling album cut. The red-haired singer does, however, surrender the top slot on the Official Album Chart at long last, bringing his epic 8 weeks run to an end. His replacements are Collabro, the five-piece boy band who stormed to victory on Britain's Got Talent earlier in the spring. A Simon Cowell act in every sense, the group specialise not so much in pop songs as musical theatre covers, their album consisting entirely of retreads of famous songs from the stage and named after a song which will be instantly familiar to anyone who saw the movie of Les Miserables last year.

Also featured on the Collabro album is their take on Let It Go, which makes it worthwhile noting the continuing presence of the Idina Menzel original on the Top 40 as one of two 2014 ever-presents. Dipping to Number 32 this week, the single racks up its 37th continuous week on the chart, all of which have been spent outside the Top 10. The all-time continuous charting record for a single which failed to reach the Top 10 is I'm Yours by Jason Mraz whose main 2009 chart run lasted a full 47 weeks, during which time it - like Let It Go - could only peak at Number 11. It should be noted that the Mraz single's continuous Top 50 run lasted a mere 29 weeks, somewhat less than the 38 weeks ratcheted up by A Scottish Soldier by Andy Stewart in 1961. All but the first three of Let It Go's chart weeks have been spent inside the Top 50, meaning it has another four weeks to draw level and bear comparison with the famous Scottish anthem.

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