Please God No
Say what you like about ACR rules, but their ability to shake matters up just at the right moment and cause some extraordinary shifting of the tides has many time in the past given the charts a much-needed unjamming. After 15 weeks on the chart Espresso's dominance comes to an end as the single's streams are halved in value. And while it is still strong enough to retain a place in the Top 10, slipping 1-9, this has still cleared the way for its immediate predecessor to return to the summit. And yes that is right, Sabrina Carpenter replaces herself at No.1 yet again as Please Please Please ascends back to the top of the charts after a fortnight away.
While incredibly unusual, this is by no means unique. But it is nonetheless only the third time in chart history that two singles have replaced each other at No.1 twice in quick succession. The first was in the opening weeks of 1969 when Lily The Pink from The Scaffold and Ob La Di Ob La Da by Marmalade each took two turns apiece at No.1. On that occasion the chart battle had a fun Beatles link, the Marmalade song a cover version of a fab four classic which they had passed on releasing as a single while The Scaffold featured Paul McCartney's bother Mike McGear among their number. The most recent occasion came in the summer of 1996 when the original release of 3 Lions by Baddiel, Skinner and The Lightning Seeds was unseated by Killing Me Softly by The Fugees, only to return to the summit in the wake of England's football success before surrendering the crown back to Killing Me Softly once again.
But this 2024 double double is unique in one sense, this the first time it has involved singles by the same artist swapping places three times over. This is now Please Please Please's fourth week in total at No.1, meaning Sabrina Carpenter has now been top of the charts for 11 weeks so far in 2024, the most any artist has managed since Olivia Rodrigo similarly spent 11 weeks at No.1 back in 2021. But there's a sense that a changing of the guard is imminent - Her chart sale of just over 49,000 is the lowest of any No.1 single so far this year. And oh yes, international acts have now been No.1 for 30 weeks in a row.
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With Saboozey's A Bar Song (Tipsy) also falling victim to the curse of ACR the door was open for two new arrivals in the Top 3. And pleasingly they are two divertingly extraordinary tracks from two rather brilliant women. Leading the way is Billie Eilish's Birds Of A Feather which spends its tenth week on release on its highest rung so far, ascending to No.2 to become the seventh Top 3 single of her career. It is her second No.2 single of the year, hard on the heels of Lunch which debuted at that position back in June, both singles of course taken from her Hit Me Hard And Soft album which spawned three Top 10 singles in the same week.
Sapphic angst of a different kind accounts for the third Top 3 hit of the week, Chappell Roan's Good Luck Babe has no need to stop the world or indeed stop the feeling just yet, enjoying itself with a brand new No.3 chart peak on what is now its 16th week on the singles chart. And there's still a feeling it could go higher still. Meanwhile her other two chart hits of the moment are all back in the ascendent. Hot To Go is a Top 20 hit for the first time with a rise to No.19 while after a brief stutter in recent weeks Red Wine Supernova is back in the Top 40 at No.39. Both hits, it is worth remembering, older releases from her previous album The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess. Good Luck Babe remains, for the moment, a non-album single.
Smooth
All of this leaves the week's highest new entry as a footnote, although given the genre it occupies you suspect that was always going to be the case. Who is the latest release from Jimin FromBTS (to give him his full name), the Korean superstar following up 2023 No.8 hit Like Crazy with his highest charting solo hit to date. The best thing I can say about it is that it is everything you would expect from a K-pop hit in 2024. Ultra-processed vocals, cod-American accents and a staging that puts as much emphasis on the energetic performance in the video as it does the melody. I've stuck my neck out on these matters many times before and have yet to be proved wrong. Who has been propelled here thanks to a huge level of initial fan support, but that just won't be enough to sustain this record in the upper reaches of the chart for any more than a week. Like Crazy was Top 10 for a week, Top 20 for a fortnight and Top 40 for three weeks before vanishing. Are you really going to bet against this doing the same?
Hair
But Jimin isn't the only solo member of a superstar pop group to land a Top 10 new entry this week. With the arrival of the newly mononymed Jade (who is in no way to be confused with the New Jill Swing act from the 90s) we have now completed the full house of Little Mix solo stars.
Let's recap where we have got to:
First out the gate was Jesy Nelson (who kept her surname). She had one hit single (Boyz) in 2021 and has done nothing of note since. Then just over a year ago came Leigh-Ann who missed the Top 10 with No.11 hit Don't Say Love, became the only one of the four to date to land a second Top 40 hit (My Love peaking at No.28) but who has given us radio silence since. Finally there was Perrie whose debut single Forget About Us was briefly No.10 back in April but whose second single Tears bombed out at No.69 a few weeks ago.
Have they saved the best until last? Well on the face of it, perhaps they have. Jade's debut solo hit Angel Of My Dreams is a bold statement of intent, a sprawling hybrid of a single which hurtles between pop, electroclash and neo-soul at breakneck pace during its three and a half minutes. The fingerprints of Mike Sabath are all over this, the American songwriter the man behind many of Raye's biggest moments (including Escapism) and following the principle that if you have a decent enough hook you can do what you want in between. Throw in a fabulous video that again is rammed with pop culture references (including being unafraid to back reference Jade Thirlwell's long association with X Factor and including footage of her auditioning as a 15 year old schoolgirl) and you have what was always going to be a quite compelling release.
It could have done better. No.7 first week out beats Leigh-Ann and Perrie but can't quite equal Jesy, but it is still an impressive start. But then again so were the first week numbers for the debuts of her bandmates, and they faded surprisingly fast. As I've banged on before, to treat the Little Mix girls as viable solo stars you have to overlook that we saw them all fail their auditions to be one, their celebrity deriving from their work as an artificially created foursome. They now have all had solo hits based on name value alone. Now we wait to see which of them actually has the staying power to make it. And lest we forget, it took three albums and some herculean effort to get Harry Styles over the line.
Boots
Can we give another token mention to Austin by Dasha? The song that simply refuses to go away is back up a place at No.8, a chart position it has only occupied once before - 15 weeks ago in fact at the start of its epic Top 10 run which has seen the country track hurtle between positions 7 and 10 without ever progressing further. It has spent seven of those at No.10 (including a record 5 in a row) and a further six at No.9.
Lower down the singles chart we have movement and some interesting stories that are developing. Leading the charge is Kisses from Bl3ss, Camrinwatsn and the others whose names I'm not typing out in full here. Now 8 weeks on the chart and 6 as a Top 75 single the annoyingly clip-friendly dance hit reaches its highest chart position yet with a jump to No.13. Top 10 appears to be its most immediate destiny.
Benson Boone meanwhile is locked in a chart battle with himself, his former No.1 and long since ACRd Beautiful Things continuing to swap places with follow-up Slow It Down. The latter celebrates its 11th straight week as a Top 20 hit by finally oozing to a brand new peak of No.14. Beautiful Things meanwhile refuses to go away. Having tumbled to No.19 when relegated to ACR seven weeks ago it briefly fell to No.21 but has not been out of the Top 20 since. This week the track is back up once more to its post-ACR high of No.16, a position it last scaled a fortnight ago.
Girl, So Confusing
Ask anyone who works in the music industry and they will tell you that one of the biggest questions they wrestle with is how to give an album range and lifespan. It is one thing to pop a number and land a good chart position first week, another altogether to either persuade people to keep buying it or continue to amass the streams to keep it alive. The biggest names (hello Taylor) do this organically. So how does anyone else compete? Well in the case of Charli XCX the tactic appears to have been to turn her into her own brand. Her BRAT album was well received from the outset, but its life as a Top 10 album has been sustained for almost two months now thanks to a slow but steady campaign to call this a BRAT summer. Persuading people that the record is what they need in their life to define 2024. And slowly but surely it is working. Because half the people reading this will already know what I mean by BRAT summer.
Now her singles are starting once more to make chart waves. 360 debuted as the album's second pre-release single back in May at No.41 but then shot into contention a month later when BRAT was released, surging forward to No.27. A Top 40 ever-present ever since it now gets a fire lit under it and charges to a brand new peak of No.18 to become her biggest chart hit since Speed Drive made the Top 10 last summer. But it now has a twin as well, with album cut Apple now enjoying its own level of viral fame, and having belatedly charted a fortnight ago is now a Top 40 hit in its own right with a surge to No.23. Blame Kamala Harris for this, if you must.
Adam Port's Move, flagged up last week as one to watch, is justifying our eyes. A 14 place climb eases it to No.25. Just hope it doesn't stall for a bit after this effort. Plenty of hits do.
Too Many To Name
Eight-piece K-Pop outfit Stray Kids made their UK chart debut at the tail end of last year with No.44 hit Lalalala, but following a headline performance at the BST Hyde Park Festival (quite the booking!) earlier this month they now make the Top 40 for the very first time. Early flashes suggested Chk Chk Boom might be contending for a Top 10 placing but that was naturally a false dawn. No.30 it is then and there it will almost certainly peak. We need a name for the phenomenon of K-pop hits popping a number for fanbases but failing to cross over to anyone else. I'll work on this.
Shortest Night
Anything that took place before Covid genuinely feels like ancient history so you would be completely forgiven for having almost forgotten Dominic Fike and his 2019 hit 3 Nights which spent half a year on the chart before peaking at No.3 towards the end of the year. The damn thing spent 11 weeks in the Top 10 and I still had to remind myself what it sounded like. But that's age for you. All of that self-own is a preamble to note that he's back in the Top 40 for the first time since,Misses belies its total by climbing to No.34 after a month sculling around the lower end of the Top 75 and fully four months after it was first released to finally give him a second hit proper. At least he didn't succumb to the temptation to go country. All the cool kids are doing it. And yes, it really is that short. Has he been taking lessons from Pinkpantheress?
All the football-themed hits have exited the chart as quickly as they arrived - but notably not Bruce Springsteen's Dancing In The Dark which has clearly sparked the interest of a new generation. Neatly coinciding with his UK dates this weekend, it holds steady, slipping a place to No.37 to become a Top 40 hit for the second week running. Dancing In The Dark was famously the track which broke Bruce as a mainstream star in this country after he'd spent ten years as a well kept secret, but even then it took two goes. The track had reached No.28 in June 1984 and was already his biggest chart hit to that date but was one of a number of notable "let's give this another try" re-releases early the following year which propelled it to No.4. The rest, as they say, was history.
Over on the albums chart Eminem's The Death Of Slim Shady (Coup De Grace) holds off the challenge of a special edition re-release from Olivia Rodrigo to enjoy a second week at No.1. Its singles all reshuffle, allowing Brand New Dance to now qualify for a chart entry and as it arrives at No.38 it becomes his landmark 50th Top 40 hit single.
Testicles
I write this on the same evening that everyone is marvelling at how bad the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics is, most people only sitting through the rained out parade to see Celine Dion take the stage (thank God she kept her testicles away). It therefore seems only appropriate that she has a Top 40 hit of her own this week. This comes courtesy of Majestic's Set My Heart On Fire, an official production of a viral mash up by Jammin Kid (who gets a co-artist credit) which merges Celine's vocals from her 2002 hit I'm Alive (originally No.17 in this country) with the melody of the disco classic And The Beat Goes On as originally performed by The Whispers. It duly becomes Celine's first chart hit in 11 years, her first appearance since Loved Me Back To Life reached No.14 in November 2013.
