This week's Official UK Singles Chart
This week's Official UK Albums Chart
With an effortlessness that befits its performers' roles as the most potentially interesting new male and female American singing talents to emerge in the last year, it is Marvin Gaye by Charlie Puth and Meghan Trainor which makes an effortless ascent to the top of the Official UK Singles chart this week. The cheeky but gentle do-wop flavoured song is far and away one of the most talked about and played singles on the planet at present, so scarcely requires an introduction here, suffice to say it is one of those records which (thanks its use of the Stand By Me chord sequence) sounds at once comfortingly familiar but also fresh enough to perk the interest of any jaded ear.
It marks the lead performer debut of Charlie Puth but his second Number One single of the year, hard on the heels of his guest role on Wiz Khalifa's See You Again (itself still a Top 40 hit this week at Number 32, 19 weeks after it first charted). Guest star Meghan Trainor, notably for the first time performing on a song she did not have a hand in writing, also tops the UK charts for the second time, following All About That Bass which had a four week run at the top in October last year.
Marvin Gaye has been available to stream for a number of weeks and last week had picked up enough traction to chart at Number 90, meaning that upon for-purchase release this week it has made an astonishing 89 place climb to the top of the charts. Technically speaking this is a singles chart record, but only based on the listings published by the Official Charts Company themselves on their own website. The printed journal of record for the British charts remains Music Week magazine which still keeps to the Top 75 chart it has published since 1978. The distinction is actually more complex than that, suffice to say it is a problem which stems from the separation of the curators and publishers of the British charts - one which does not exist in America where Billboard are both the compilers and the journal of record for the American bestseller tables.
As expected last week's chart champions One Direction suffer a dramatic fall from grace, dipping eight places to Number 9 on the chart this week. It is not quite the 1-20 falls from the top enjoyed by McFly just under a decade ago but it is easily their most disastrous second-week slump since Gotta Be You dived 3-16 in November 2011.
In an oddly quiet week the next highest new entry on the chart comes all the way down at Number 23, a position even more surprising given that the track in question is the much-hyped collision between Rita Ora and Chris Brown with Body On Me. Released with little pre-fanfare last Friday, the single fails to live up to the usual chart pedigree of both Ora and Brown, at least for now. It is officially the second single from Rita Ora's forthcoming second album, following on from Top 3 hit Poison which charted at the start of July.
Also new to this week's UK Top 40 are Selena Gomez alongside A$AP Rocky whose Good For You leaps 46-29 to finally make some kind of breakthrough after no less than seven weeks floating around the lower reaches of the Top 75. By a narrow squeak, it has now exceeded the chart peak of her last single as lead artist The Heart Wants What It Wants to become her highest charting single since Come And Get It reached Number 8 in July 2013. [Oddly the official video is the A$AP Rocky-free version].
Tough Love's first hit of 2015 was So Freakin' Tight which reached Number 11 in March and this week they return with a slightly slower starting hit but one which has a neat call-back to a famous single of old. Landing at Number 39 is Pony (Jump On It), a reworked version of Pony by a co-credited Ginuwine and which was the singer's debut chart single when it made Number 16 in January 1997. Indeed when the Tough Love single first started gaining airplay it was enough to prompt interest in the original, sending it to Number 62 last month, its first chart appearance in 17 years. Ginuwine hasn't had a chart single in well over a decade, last appearing in 2003 on Number 27 hit Hell Yeah.
Finally for this week, after a month of the singles chart being dominated by X Factor acts, it seems wrong not to ignore low-level chart arrival of one of the Class Of 2014. Four piece pop group Only The Young stood out in the last series by arriving as a fully formed group and not one which had to be thrown together at the audition stage. The group were one of two acts to be eliminated in the seventh week of the competition last year but impressed enough to be picked up by Warner Music in the new year. Their single I Do makes a rather limp debut at Number 53 which is something of a shame, the foursome eschewing pop and dance for an enjoyable acoustic nu-folk vibe. I'll be genuinely sorry to see it flop.