Just When We Thought
Under most normal circumstances, the forced ejection of a No.1 single from its position by ACR rules rather than a new market leader emerging is a matter of small regret. That feeling that the historic record of the biggest song of the week is somehow rather inorganic. Uniquely this week it arrives with an overwhelming feeling of "thank goodness for that". No more must people like myself find new things to say about a song that has been around for a year. And perhaps the singles chart can resume being the engine of the business and start to highlight new and different songs once more.
So given that we knew that a new No.1 single was in the offing, the only question was which chart hit it would be. And trust me, there was no moment this week when anyone actually knew for sure. Midweek updates were delayed anyway due to the bank holiday, but when they did it became clear that it was anyone's game. You could throw a hat over the Top 5 singles of the moment - Top 6 even. They were all that close.
But to the winner, the spoils. And the winner in question is a single that has carved the most extraordinary story of its own even before its coronation as the No.1 hit on the Official UK Singles chart. Choosin' Texas by Ella Langley has been a part of our lives since Christmas. The second countdown of the new year saw the wistful country ballad make its chart bow at No.78. Five weeks later it had made the Top 40 but then looked for all the world like it was going to progress no further. Regular readers will remember the song first became notable for its record-setting five consecutive weeks at the No.35 position.
Having escaped this last track it accelerated into the Top 20, arriving there at last in early April. But then it became stranded again, spending almost three months hurtling between positions 13 and 17, a run which included five weeks in total at No.16 (this itself also a record-equaller).
The track made the Top 10 for the first time in late June, the Top 3 in early August, and now just over a month later the 27-year-old Alabaman singer is top of the UK charts. The epic 35 week unbroken climb of Choosin' Texas is the second-longest journey to the top of the charts in history. With grim irony the all-time record was actually set back in February this year. By Rein Me In, naturally.
Choosin' Texas cannot climb any further, meaning it now cements its place as the song with the fifth-slowest Top 75 journey (be it total or continuous) to its ultimate chart peak. Check out the Chart Watch piece for w/e August 6th for the other songs in that table, and note it is only No.8 on the list that takes Top 100 weeks into account.
Not that Ella Langley is unfamiliar with the idea of being No.1. Choosin' Texas has this summer been America's Rein Me In, and at the time of writing it is atop the Hot 100 for its own 20th week, the longest-leading non-holiday #1 hit in the history of that venerable countdown.
Get Your Slide Guitars Out
Choosin' Texas is that vanishingly rare beast - a true C&W single as a UK No.1 hit. The genre's recent resurgence (even before Dolly-gate) means it is enjoying its best performance since the glory days of the late 70s. That period saw Tammy Wynette hit the top with Stand By Your Man and Kenny Rogers enjoy a brace of No.1 hits - Lucille and Coward Of The County. But after the latter departed the top in 1980 the cupboard remained bare for a startlingly long time. The jury is still out on whether Kid Rock's All Summer Long from 2008 was a 'true' country hit, as it interpolated two country-rock tracks (Werewolves Of London and Sweet Home Alabama). More decidedly country though were Lil Nas X's Old Town Road (2019) and Beyonce's Texas Hold'Em (2024), Choosin' Texas now joining them both. Note we also can't count acts such as Olivia Newton-John and Taylor Swift who began their careers as country stars but then pivoted to pop for their No.1 hits.
On that basis Ella Langley is the first female country star since Tammy Wynette in 1975 to have a No.1 single. And that is well worth shouting about.
But there's another elephant in the room. I noted last week the sagging of the chart sales of the biggest hits of the moment. Essentially de-jure rather than de-facto No.1, Ella Langley tops the UK singles chart with a sale of just 26,909. That's the lowest for any single since Coldplay's Viva La Vida had a week of glory in June 2008 with a sale of just over 23,000. The all-time lowest recorded sale for a No.1 hit remains the 17,694 paid copies of No Tomorrow by Orson in March 2006.
Choosin' Texas may have benefitted more than a little by online noise made by country fans to encourage a buy-in of copies of the track to nudge it over the line. The song was indeed downloaded 1,171 times last week. It doesn't sound a lot, granted. But it is more than the 1,644 chart units margin it held over the No.2 single of the week. Without them we could well have been telling a very different story.
Not Such A Stranger
So to the week's runner-up which was… not one of the ones that we were expecting. Step forward then Sienna Spiro who accelerates to a new peak of No.2 with Great Expectation. As these pages have recounted so many times since she made her chart bow at the end of last year, the British singer is one of those acts who is so breathtakingly good and whose songs are all so compelling in their own way that it was both baffling and only a matter of time before she came good and broke through to the mainstream. And with this single this may be the moment it happens. The fourth single to be taken from her album The Visitor, Great Expectation has been on the chart for nine weeks now, this being its fifth in the Top 10. And hey, with Choosin' Texas looking precarious and at severe risk of a gutting ACR decline of its own, Ms Spiro is now in prime position to have a No.1 hit of her own in due course.
Carefully Prompted
Slipping a place then to No.3 is Movin' To The Sun(o) by Hugel and his alleged collaborators. Regular reader Bence Gyulai got in touch during the week to shed more light on the identity of Imael Angel, the originator of the song. Real name Bernadett Gango, she is a Hungarian-born Londoner whose previous claim to fame was as a reiki healer. According to an interview she gave to Hungarian TV, Movin' To The Sun was her attempt to manifest a desire to move to Spain and created after she told her story to Suno which span up the song for her. This may well make her the highest-charting "artist" of her nationality. Although given she neither wrote the words nor the music for which she is nonetheless credited and makes but a brief spoken contribution to the hit song that carries her name, is she really a "performer" in the intended sense? This debate may run and run.
Rag Dolly
We swerve back to Nashville to acknowledge the continuing chart presence of the late Dolly Parton. Breathless media headlines greeted the news from the Sunday First Look that she was potentially leading the chart race, although events later in the week proved that to be premature. Sympathetic streams following her death inevitably began to tail off shortly after the weekend, meaning what we are left with is the echoes of what might have been.
Still, those echoes are damn loud. Previous chart flop 9 To 5 takes over as both Dolly's biggest hit of the moment and indeed her biggest chart single of all time as it accelerates to No.5 - 42 places higher than it peaked upon first release in 1981. The more vintage Jolene rises three places to No.6, thus beating its original No.7 peak from 1976.
Alas not reaching a new peak, but back in the Top 10 for the first time since release is Islands In The Stream. The Kenny Rogers duet from 1983 is now No.9, two places shy of its original peak. There was much chatter both in the comments here and in other forums about the fact that the credits for the song have over the years been reversed. Originally billed as "Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton", since the digital era began the song has been credited to the two artists in reverse - this meaning Dolly registers as the primary artist instead of Kenny.
You'll note that the Official Charts website lists the song's chart history as two separate entities: The 1983 physical release and its post-2007 chartings as a digital track. But with differently ordered credits for each. Based on the song's unique ISRC number (the digital catalogue reference that gives a song its unique ID in music databases of any kind), this change of artist metadata probably occurred in the mid-90s. Where a song features the performers in co-billing and where they are both signed to the label on which the song appears (as both were at the time) chart rules mean the label can nominate an artist to be the "primary" one for chart purposes. RCA/Sony could have switched Kenny for Dolly (and thus cleared the path for I Will Always Love You to chart for its composer for the very first time) but ultimately made no moves to do so.
One final token mention for Rein Me In before it is (hopefully) put to bed. As noted last week, as it slides to No.7 this is now its 36th consecutive week as a Top 10 hit single. And that is yet another record it can now claim.
So Moved On
There are no actual new entries to the Top 40 this week, but there are a handful of new arrivals. The biggest of these isn't even a new song though. Dua Lipa's Training Season, a No.4 hit in March 2024, went briefly viral a few weeks ago. This prompted her label to cash in with the release of a new digital EP that compiles various mixes together for the first time. That release is what prompts the single to rocket back into the Top 20 this week at No.18. But it seems unlikely to stick around.
Sombr's My Body Isn't Ready has taken time to get ready as it were, but now is making chart progress. It charted inside the Top 30 upon release in July, fell out of the Top 40 altogether a few weeks later but then gained second wind. In the last three weeks it has moved 30-22-28 and now makes a new flying leap to No.19 and become a Top 20 hit for the first time - his fifth to date.
Also heading for the Top 20 (and maybe more) it seems is Stop The Wedding from Ashe, now up to No.23. Rebounding too as it steadily goes more viral is Ain't In LA by Slovakia's very own Adela. Having initially peaked (it seemed) at No.32 last month and having fallen out of the 40 altogether last week it now surges back into contention with a flying leap of No.26. One of the song's co-writers is Theron Thomas who is entirely comfortable with the fact that the track is largely a re-write of Miley Cyrus' We Can't Stop. But then he wrote that too, so cannot complain.
A Life Less Ordinary
So the only thing resembling an actual new entry in the whole of the Top 75 is a pair of Alex Warren tracks from his new album Wildchild which duly lands him a second No.1 record on the albums chart in the space of 23 months. New cuts Cry Wolf and Emerald Eyes land at 49 and 58 respectively. Only two tracks you will note. There might have been a third, but the continuing chart existence of former No.1 hit Ordinary which lurks this week at No.29 means he was already part way to his full quota of three hits.
The most interesting story of the week though is perhaps a little further down the albums chart. Bananarama were, admittedly, more of a singles act than album-makers. But they also had the misfortune to sell an OK amount of records in an era when many acts were selling shedloads. Hence some rather disappointing historical chart performances. A 40th anniversary re-release of their True Confessions album this week goes some way to redressing the balance. It re-enters the albums chart at No.6, bettering its original 1986 peak by some 40 places. In the process it becomes the celebrated all-female group's highest-charting studio album ever: beating out the No.8 peak of their debut Deep Sea Skiving from 1983. Their only record to chart higher was 1988's The Greatest Hits collection which would eventually top out at No.3.
