A Race Like All The Others
For the briefest of moments, it looked as if the ding-dong chart battle of the last few weeks was about to go another spectacular round. Early sales flashes suggested a very good chance that David Guetta and Bebe Rexha were about to reclaim the No.1 position they surrendered to Sam Smith and Kim Petras a week ago.
In the end, it turned out to be another comfortable win for the incumbent, meaning Unholy spends a comfortable second week at the summit, giving us the kind of stability at the top we haven't seen since the end of the summer. Does this then mean the pair are set to remain there until a superstar name blows them out the water? Time will tell.
What we do have though is a Top 4 made up entirely of No.1 singles, Dave and Bebe at No.2 are joined by Lewis Capaldi still clinging on doggedly at No.3 and Eliza Rose and Interplanetary Criminal steady at No.4. The cycle is only broken by OneRepublic who remain No.5 with I Ain't Worried where for now it appears to have peaked.
Fascinatingly Unholy is the only one of these to increase its chart sales week on week, suggesting that it is indeed surging ahead of the chasing pack.
Which One Is Luigi?
The highest new entry of the week is not where we expected it to be. Ed Sheeran's one-off new single Celestial began the week buzzing around the lower end of the Top 20. It is a soundtrack single - not from a movie, but instead from the two video games Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet and so as such it probably wasn't such a shock that it was slightly less essential than a normal Ed Sheeran release. After all his contribution to the soundtrack of one of the Hobbit films I See Fire limped to a mere No.13 in November 2013 (admittedly prior to his all-round superstardom) although it would eventually linger around and notch up no fewer than 56 weeks on the Top 75.
So anyway, Celestial set to become a lesser hit? Not such a shock. But clearly that wasn't good enough for someone, somewhere and so a renewed push for the track appears to have kicked it into life and onto a higher level. The result is instead a No.6 debut to make him one of only five artists in the whole of chart history to have enjoyed 40 Top 10 hits. The others are all the names you might expect - Elvis, Cliff, Madonna and Michael Jackson.
If you count Destiny's Child hits then Beyonce isn't too far behind, Cuff It now her 35th career entry into the upper reaches as it climbs to No.10.
The New Old Guys
KSI has a new hit, hard on the heels of summertime release Not Over Yet. Hammering the point home with perhaps unnecessary roughness, Summer Is Over starts slowly and arrives at No.24.
More fascinating is the arrival at No.26 of the alarmingly Bowie-esque Body Paint from Arctic Monkeys, the second single from their forthcoming new album The Car. That's precisely the same position its predecessor There'd Better Be A Mirrorball arrived at four weeks ago. That track enjoys a resurgence of its own this week as it reappears at No.48. It means the Arctics now have three concurrent hit singles, the two newer tracks still accompanied by 15-year-old album track 505 whose Tik Tok popularity means it continues to scull around the lower end of the chart, encumbered of course by permanent ACR status. This week it rises to No.73 to beat the No.74 it first appeared at as an album cut back in May 2007.
Newer Guys And Golden Oldies
New to the Top 40 is Romantic Homicide from D4VD which arrives at No.31 after a four-week climb, and it is joined by bubbly American pop hit Victoria's Secret from Jax, an even slower burner which is now on its ninth chart week but at a brand new peak of No.39. This hasn't so much gone viral thanks to Tik Tok but has benefitted from some in-app promotion. Even if that has taken time to work it seems.
Outside the Top 40 there are two golden oldies landing for two very different reasons. Summertime Sadness was a No.4 hit for Lana Del Rey in August 2013 but reappears now at No.50 in a new version - endorsed by the singer herself - produced by Speed Radio and which as the title suggests features her voice sped up to chipmunk levels. The original of course only became a hit in a dance version, Cedric Gervais credited with taking the original album track onto the dancefloor and to massive international success.
And following his passing last week it seems only fitting that Coolio's 1995 No.1 hit Gangsta's Paradise makes a chart reappearance, popping up at No.55.
Wear A Marsk
We are of course now in Q4 the final stretch of the year when in theory all the biggest new product finally arrives on the shelves. We've already mentioned a new Arctic Monkeys album is imminent and of course there's new Taylor Swift (new new, and not old new for a change) on the way in two weeks' time. This week there are eight new entries in the Top 20 of the Official UK Albums chart, although the No.1 race was an intriguing battle between Slipknot's seventh album The End So Far and a super-deluxe re-release of Older by George Michael, originally released back in 1996. It was a race eventually resolved in favour of the be-masked American nu-metallers, their third No.1 album on these shores.
