This week's Official UK Singles Chart

This week's Official UK Albums Chart

So we've now had a whole lunar month of bass. Meghan Trainor's debut single remains a nuclear record, obliterating the competition with almost effortless ease. The failure of any other single to even come close to matching her sales performance means that All About That Bass this week spends its fourth straight week at Number One on the Official UK Singles Chart, the first record to do so since Rather Be by Clean Bandit featuring Jess Glynne also performed the feat back in February - both singles now neck and neck as the longest running Number One hits of the year. Trainor is the first solo female to have a four week run at the top since Carly Rae Jepsen in 2012 and indeed she has now spent longer at Number One than any American female since Katy Perry lasted five weeks on top with I Kissed A Girl way back in the summer of 2008. Put simply she is sweeping all before her - and all this without once setting foot in this country to promote the record.

So with Trainor immovable at the top, most attention this week shifted to the race to be Number 2, one which was all but impossible to predict with singles moving in and out of contention as the week progressed. The ultimate victor, however, is Ed Sheeran who climbs a further two places with Thinking Out Loud to land his second biggest chart single to date. His only release to eclipse this so far is still holding steady too, former Number One Sing climbing 30-26 to land its highest chart placing for five weeks. Meanwhile, his other recent single Don't also refuses to die, climbing 28-22, its own best performance for four weeks.

The highest new entry of the week then lands at Number 3, although this itself is a track which has been in circulation for some time. London house producers Waze & Odyssey created their own remix of the old R Kelly track Bump N' Grind a little over two years ago, the mix intended as a one-off to drop in their sets. After loaning copies to fellow performers the track took on a life of its own, a handful of enterprising souls also uploading it to YouTube in the meantime and further increasing the buzz around the intriguing reworking of the 1990s hit. It has apparently taken a full year for a full commercial release of the mix to be arranged, and so after one of the more protracted build-ups, the sampled and drowned in echo tones of R Kelly finally make the singles chart again. At a stroke the remix beats the chart peak of the original version of Bump N' Grind, the single having made Number 8 in January 1995 but it furthermore gives R Kelly his biggest British hit single since his appearance on Ja Rule's Wonderful which topped the charts exactly nine years and 51 weeks ago. If only they'd waited another week.

Also brand new inside the Top 10 is Fuse ODG who partners with Angel on bright and bubbly Number 9 hit T.I.N.A., the Afrobeat star claiming his third Top 10 hit single of the year with the follow-up to Top 3 hit Dangerous Love. His collaborator Angel appeared to be onto a good thing when his single Wonderful also reached Number 9 in the summer of 2012 but his subsequent releases all missed the Top 40. By a strange coincidence, Angel's last chart hit of note was alongside Tinchy Stryder on Lights On in the summer of 2013. It's chart peak? Number 9.

It seems rather mean-spirited to hammer the point home, but as expected some of the big new arrivals from apparently popular boy bands suffer alarming sales sags in their second week on sale. One Direction's Steal My Girl drops 3-11, with not even the arrival of its video this week helping to shore up sales. Meanwhile, The Vamps' new take on Cecelia (Breaking My Heart) fares even worse, dipping 9-21. Poor Talay Riley has the dubious honour of appearing in successive weeks on singles which spend just one week on the Top 40, his latest participation on Wilkinson's Dirty Love diving 20-41.

Triumphant on the Official UK Albums chart this week is former BRIT Award-winning folk singer Ben Howard whose second album Forget Where We Were storms to the summit to give him a first-ever Number One album. He does so beating a veritable parade of veteran acts who all have new albums out this week, although his most notable feat is to deny veteran rockers Slipknot their first ever chart-topper as they instead land at Number 2 with 5 - The Gray Chapter. Lower down there are new arrivals for Neil Diamond (Number 4), Status Quo (Number 5), Scott Walker (Number 30), Aretha Franklin (Number 32) and Billy Idol (Number 35).

The imminent release of Taylor Swift's forthcoming new album 1989 saw its promotional activity step up a gear this week with the release of new instant grat track Welcome To New York. Whilst she didn't quite manage to match her Canadian exploits of topping the download listings with eight seconds of white noise, the new single was in great demand during the week and was a near permanent fixture in the Top 20 of the live charts. It, therefore, may come as a surprise to see the track chart at a lowly Number 39 this week, although based on previous expectations it should not be there at all. Prompted by the increasing use of multiple instant grats by record labels teasing big new releases, iTunes have now updated their systems and can further discriminate between copies delivered to album purchasers and those who have bought tracks standalone. So whilst grafitied 'sales' of the Taylor Swift track are disqualified from the chart (with lead single Shake It Off also made available under these terms), the single sold enough individual copies this week to qualify for this Top 40 chart placing.

Meanwhile Happy is still at Top 40 hit single, climbing 37-35 in its 47th week around.