You are reading the famous weekly guide to the Official UK Charts. The longest-running British music column online.
Read about this week's Top 40 charts and the stories behind the biggest new hit singles. Plus browse the complete archive of the last 27 years of pop charts analysis, a resource of over 1300 articles documenting over a quarter of a century of popular music history.
Stormzy remains top but gets another hit single by putting his former mentor on blast. But the week belongs to Future, landing himself something he has never before achieved in his long and storied career. A major British hit single.
With perhaps just a little help from some timely discounting Stormzy manages the chart double at long last and can now investigate breeding possibilities between his two Official Chart awards. Elsewhere Justin Bieber has the first big new hit of the year, but the rest of the singles chart is clogged up with many older hits enjoying a mysterious return to chart form. All is explained inside.
It is the official rubberband chart. The Christmas songs vanish and TWANG everything else pings back into place as if the last few weeks were nothing more than a bad dream. It means the path is finally clear for Stormzy to land his third Number One single in the past 12 months. And only serves to make Ed Sheeran even more famous than he already was. Plus some unexpected rule changes and some rather startling albums chart removals.
Cry me a river, the expected coronation of Mariah Carey didn't happen. Instead, Ellie Goulding rides the river Amazon and sails her way to a third Number One. There are modern-day hits swimming around in the mess of festive streams, but we have to look hard to find them.
