Stop The World!
All good things come to those who wait. And Chappell Roan has had to wait a fair while for her chance to top the charts.
She spent most of last summer threatening to after all, the sublime Good Luck Babe spending the entire period from August through to October last year hovering around the Top 3, peaking at No.2 on three separate occasions - the last of them for four consecutive weeks.
So you can't say her final triumph hasn’t been earned. In the same week that she received two Brit Awards she ascends to the top of the Official UK Singles chart with Pink Pony Club, a track taken from her Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess album although - as we'll discuss in a moment - actually predates it by no small degree.
The chart journey of the viral track has been an extended one, belatedly beginning back at the end of September after many weeks "starred-out" as her fourth biggest track of the time. The eventual demise of Red Wine Supernova which had been inhibiting it led to Pink Pony Club belatedly debuting on the singles chart at No.21, kicking off a run which saw it apparently peak at No.13 before Christmas intervened to bring a brief end to its presence. Since Christmas the single has gone from strength to strength, re-debuting in January at the same No.22 position it was last seen at before (after a brief wobble) rising to prominence in the Top 10 and now to ultimate glory as the American star's first-ever No.1 single.
Reportedly the composition that inspired her to embrace her queerness and let it be part of who she was as an artist, the euphemisms of Pink Pony Club could hardly be more overt and if the failure of the sapphic love torment of Good Luck Babe to reach the summit was a disappointment then she has at least made up for it with a song celebrating being out and proud.
Pink Pony Club is a notably old school type of pop record, clocking in at over four minutes in a way that precious few current hits manage to do so (keeping it to three minutes or less is considered best to maximise streaming earholes). But that might be because its production actually predates many contemporary pop hits, Roan first releasing it to the world five years ago next month - ironically at the very moment the titular club was likely to be closed for business for the foreseeable.
Stats on "slow climbs to No.1" have been skewed ever so slightly by certain Christmas records over the past few years, so Pink Pony Club's five year wait to reach the top is ever so slightly eclipsed by the mutli-decade journeys undertaken by Last Christmas and All I Want For Christmas Is You in recent years. If you want comparisons with other slow burning hits of this decade, then Chappell Roan's hit edges past Saint Jhn's Roses which topped the charts in March 2020 (ironically just a couple of weeks after PPC was first released) just shy of four years since its original mix was first issued.
Finally we can note that of the 28 different Top 75 singles to mention the colour pink in the title, this is the fourth to reach No.1, the third different song and the first of what you might call the modern era. In 1955 two versions of Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White reached the top, for Perez Prado and Eddie Calvert. And then in 1968 The Scaffold (featuring poet Roger McGough, future Tiswas star John Gorman and Paul McCartney's brother Mike McGear) took top spot with Lily The Pink.
Beautiful Hits
Former No.1 Not Like Us slips a place to No.2 so the Top 3 is completed by Alex Warren's still beautifully compelling Ordinary which ascends to a brand new peak in its fourth week on the chart - and how refreshing is it to see a big hit that hasn't actually been swilling around for months on end already.
Warren nicks the No.3 spot from Benson Boone's Beautiful Things which instead edges up a place to No.4 to continue its almost absurd second wind a full year after it first topped the charts. Entertainingly this is to the detriment of his brand new single Sorry I'm Here For Someone Else which may well eventually become as big a hit as this one, but for the moment slips into being almost unnoticed at No.30.
Statuesque Statuettes
So let's now turn to the Brit Awards, the ceremony having taken place in front of a live TV audience last Saturday night and which, despite my marvelling that it opened with a performance by an American superstar (Sabrina) did actually turn out to be an elegantly curated tribute to a year in which British stars did at least something worth recognising. And with precious few "who dey?" moments to confuse the casual TV audience. And I do hope Central Cee was at a table composing a new verse about having to watch Stormzy pick up an award instead of him (which even Big Mike had the grace to be a little embarrassed about given he made precisely one record in 2024).
But the big question is, did it impact the charts? Well, kind of. The experience of past years shows that while a big music TV event gives the featured acts in question a small consumption bump, you largely have to read between the lines to see what they are. The big winner was perhaps Sabrina Carpenter who manoeuvres her way back to the top of the albums chart with Short N' Sweet after a week away, this now its fourth visit to the summit.
The one person who should have moved the dial is Charli XCX, the night's big winner who went home with a fistful of statuettes. But the elephant in the room was that she did not perform on the night, meaning anyone who sat through all two and a half hours of the show would have been left with the understanding that was an artist of note last year but with no idea what her music actually sounds like. Granted the bar to discovering this is now far lower than it was, but it is so very telling that her BRAT album only edges up a few places to No.10.
So the big winner from the night was ironically the man who had won before the night, namely Rising Star recipient Myles Smith. Following his performance at the ceremony Nice To Meet You revives from the chart depths, charging 53-8 after what is quite patently an ACR reset. But you can't argue that this wasn't inappropriate. The track peaked at No.6 back in January after first charting as long ago as November.
Teddy Swims performed as the second token American of the night, and he too gets a small boost. The 16-10 jump for Bad Dreams, the 41-32 rise for Lose Control and the 48-41 jump for The Door are all minor blips in the grand scheme of things, but all Brits attributable. So too is the reappearance of Jade's Angel Of My Dreams after mass block voting helped her to win Best Pop Act and her own quite triumphant awards night performance. The label could have been forgiven for asking for a reset of this too, but for the fact she has a brand new single due out. And one which might just hopefully give her a second hit proper.
A Song I Used To Know
To tell the story of the only non-Brits new entry of the week requires a bit of time to unpick, so get comfortable.
It involves the lady of the moment Doechii and a track that she self-uploaded to YouTube back in 2019. Called Anxiety it languished, like much of her early self-released work did, until a couple of weeks ago when it began to blow up virally on TikTok. Yes, despite her complaining in Denial Is A River that her record label are wanting TikToks from her to the detriment of full songs, it appears that the much-maligned app is handing her a hit in waiting from her old material. The one complication is that no full release of the track was available, something which her label have now scrambled to arrange. Samples take time to clear you know.
But for fans desperate for the song, salvation is at hand. Rapper Sleepy Hallow sampled the Doechii cut for his own ends, using her vocals on the chorus of his own 2023 single, also called Anxiety (only this time stylised as A N X I E T Y which I'm damned if I'm typing out more than once). Originally a No.52 hit back in 2023, the Sleepy Hallow track has also in its own small way gone viral - and with this one fully available it has benefitted from a surge of interest and slams into the UK charts out of nowhere at No.15. All of which nicely sets the stage for an interesting battle between sampled and original tracks of the kind we haven't seen since the Paper Planes/Swagga Like Us war of September 2008.
A subtext to all of the above is the fun part, that both versions of Anxiety actually owe their roots to an entirely different track - Somebody That I Used To Know by Gotye featuring Kimbra which was a huge global smash (and a UK No.1 single) back in 2012.
What?
We should take a moment to note the long-running and quite extraordinary chart run of Who by Jimin, which continues to defy its logical status as a bubble hit. To a certain extent it still is, admired and consumed solely by fans within the K-pop bubble, but they are repeatedly conspiring to send the single hurtling up and down the charts in a manner which defies any other logical explanation. Originally a No.4 hit upon release in August last year, the track enjoyed a new year resurgence which saw it hurtle 64-5-13-7 before settling down to a pattern of two weeks of chart decline and one week of rebound. That's a pattern which repeats this week, with the single having moved 17-37-44 but now ricocheting back into the Top 40 at No.23. Where will it end up next? "Who" knows?
Perfect Arrivals
Two more new arrivals in the Top 40 to round off: It Isn't Perfect But It Might Be by Olivia Dean is taken from the soundtrack of the new Bridget Jones movie and now reaches a new peak of No.36. It is only the second hit single for the singer, her first coming with a streaming exclusive cover of The Christmas Song in 2021, a hit which made No.19 at the end of that year before vanishing forever. Also new after a four week chart climb is Love Me Not by Ravyn Lenae. But this is another slow burner, it was first released in May last year.
