This week's Official UK Singles Chart
This week's Official UK Albums Chart
As was clear from the start of the week, there is no change at the top of the Official UK Singles chart this week, Lukas Graham remaining immovable In both sales and streams and so notching up a second week at Number One with 7 Years. Its combined sale of close to 134,000 copies is almost double that of its nearest rival.
Pillowtalk by ZAYN remains at Number 2, and given that when it debuted at the top I wondered just where it would end up in week 3 or 4 of its sales life, full credit to the track for having maintained its chart position beyond the initial rush of interest from the Directioners.
Rising one place to Number 3 are Rihanna and Drake with Work. For Rihanna this is a Top 3 hit just a few weeks shy of a year since her last, FourFiveSeconds ascending into third place at the start of March 2015. It is also Drake's second Top 3 hit single in the last few months, hard on the heels of Hotline Bling which also peaked at Number 3 in early November. His only single ever to climb higher was perhaps prophetically his last guest role on a Rihanna single with What's My Name topping the charts in early 2011.
The only new arrival to the parade of Top 10 singles is Lush Life from Zara Larsson to give the singer a Top 10 hit under her own steam as opposed to guesting on someone else's track - Never Forget You which credited MNEK as lead artist reached Number 5 last year.
The highest new entry of the week is a hit record born of tragedy. Prior to last Sunday the celebrity of four piece group Viola Beach was confined to those with their ear to the ground for up and coming new talent. The group had recorded sessions for BBC Introducing and were genuinely considered to be a young act with a great deal of sales potential - a potential that sadly will never be realised. Late on Saturday night following a gig in Sweden their car plunged off a bridge into a canal. All four members of the group along with their manager perished, the youngest of them just 19.
Inevitably this prompted interest in the two tracks they had released for sale to date. As a result Swings & Waterslides began to climb the sales rankings and equally as inevitably sparked talk on social media of the chance to send the track to Number One and secure a lasting chart memorial for the group. Over the course of the week the single did indeed climb its way into sales contention (even sneaking a run at the top of the iTunes table on a technicality when the top selling version of the Lukas Graham track was removed from the database) but as is so frequently the case now for tracks beholden to brief bursts of topicality or treated as a virtue signal, its streams were down the lower end of the scale.
As a result Swings & Waterslides debuts at a still creditable Number 11, their only other recorded work their last single Boys That Sing sitting at Number 80. The group thus become one of a small handful of acts to have managed the odd feat of making their singles chart debut posthumously, joining such names as Nick Drake, Eva Cassidy and Laurel & Hardy. The simultaneous deaths of entire groups of musicians are thankfully rare, putting Viola Beach into something of a unique class of their own.
After a few weeks away the double whammy of both the Grammy's and the upcoming Brit Awards combined to propel Adele's 25 back to the top of the Official UK Albums chart after an absence of five weeks. It is the album's eighth week in total at the top of the charts since its release. The highest new entry goes to a returning Ronan Keating. Neatly timed for mother's day his ninth solo studio album Time Of My Life lands at Number 4 although the former Boyzone singer remains absent from the singles chart - his last hit record coming thanks to his cover of Iris which reached Number 15 in August 2006.
