Chart Watch Weekly - April 4th 2022

Dave and Michael sitting in a tree, or at least at the very top of the British charts. Unusually it is the foreign scene that produces the most exciting new music of the week, as you will discover if you read on.

Also in this week’s steadily glowing halogen hob of facts:

We have hit another of those periods where the listening taste of the British public has hit a groove and it will take an earthquake to shift them. This happens on a semi-regular basis, almost like clockwork. People know what they love and seem to love what they know, to the extent that the singles chart looks a bit swamp-like.

Hence after the non-moving Top 7 last week, this week it is the turn of the Top 5 to stay the same. Dave remains No.1 with Starlight for a fourth week at the top, leading Official Charts to proclaim it as the longest-running No.1 rap single by a solo British act (my emphasis). It is of course also the joint longest-running British-made rap No.1 of all time, drawing level with Dizzee Rascal, Calvin Harris, and Chrome’s Dance Wiv Me.

The battle at the summit was actually a very close run thing. Both Dave and Aitch traded places with each other at the head of the table at the start of the week, the gap between the pair measured in the hundreds. Dave’s track opened up a bigger lead as the week drew on, but the comparative sales of both - 51,718 to 48,578 is the smallest margin by which Starlight has claimed victory so far.

And as we’ll see later, a changing of the guard next week is all but guaranteed.

Assuming that Michael Buble’s new album was going to be No.1 this week was a lazy one, but one that turned out to be perfectly correct. However, the margin of his victory turned out to be far narrower than anyone could have predicted.

Higher becomes the crooner’s fifth No.1 album in this country and his second in a row, this following in the footsteps of Love which hit the top in 2018. Its certified sale was a mere 21,170, the lowest first-week total he’s enjoyed since he first shot to stardom (his first three albums were all released prior to Michael Parkinson’s patronage and promotion).

In second place came Machine Gun Kelly with mainstream sell out (sic) which in the end posted a chart sale of its own of 20,960 - just 210 copies (or their streaming equivalents) behind. The last time the gap between No.1 and No.2 albums was this tight was back in May 2020 when Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia aced the chart race by a 191 copy margin - this, incidentally, the week she set a record for the lowest weekly sale by a No.1 album ever with just 7,317 sales. But that was Covid lockdown for you.

Oh yes, and we should also give due regard to Matt Goss (of Bros, to give him his full title) who has the No.7 album of the week with The Beautiful Unknown. It is easily his highest-charting solo album to date, his only other to even make the Top 75 at all was Life You Imagine which hit No.27 in 2013.

However, let us note for the record that Life You Imagine sold 4,722 physical and digital copies (streams were not a thing then) to creep into the Top 30 in October 2013. The Beautiful Unknown this week posts 5,043 chart sales. Mr Goss is at the very least maintaining his level.

To The States where Machine Gun Kelly is top of the albums chart in his home country. Heat Waves continues its extraordinary run at No.1, five weeks in a row to now become the longest-running Hot 100 chart-topper by a British group since Can’t Help Falling In Love from UB40 spent seven weeks at the summit back in 1993. Or to put it another way, back when Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley was just three and a half years old.

Vaulting into the Top 10 and indeed blasting its way to the Top 3 is Big Energy by Latto, another slow-burning hit that is now in its 23rd week on the Hot 100 but finally, it seems, a certifiable smash. The reason for this abrupt leap is due to the release of a remix by DJ KHALED (his words) which interpolates elements of Mariah Carey’s Fantasy (via newly recorded vocals from the lady herself) to level up the cut into a true radio-friendly piece of work. It was already heavily influenced by Genius Of Love by The Tom Tom Club which means half the members of Talking Heads also get composing credits.

Big Energy has yet to have any kind of impact in Britain, despite the remix. And that’s a shame because this has transformed it into something rather fabulous.

Yeah, so this is this week’s Australian Top 10. I may as well run down the movers here to save you looking them up. At No.5 Lost Frequencies are up one place. At No.6 Ed Sheeran is down one place. And that’s basically it.

I can’t wait to see what it looks like next week, can you?

Australia’s highest new entry is another viral hit to which Britain once more seems curiously immune. The cover of Suzanne Vega’s semi-legendary Tom’s Diner as performed by German rock groups AnnenMayKantereit and Giant Rooks. They first released this bizarre (but rather clever) collaboration in 2019 only to now see it surface on TikTok. It smashes into the Aussie charts at No.18. In Britain it has been No.63 for the past two weeks and appears to be going nowhere fast.

With immaculate timing we turn our attention to the French charts just as they have a changing of the guard of their own at No.1. Newly installed at the top of the SNEP countdown is 44-year-old Frenchman Disiz. The rapper and actor has been active for well over 20 years now, but what is most extraordinary is that until now his only Top 10 single in his home country was his debut hit J'pète Les Plombs way back in 2000. So after a 22-year wait he not only has another smash hit but his first-ever No.1 record. This is Rencontre (“encounter”) and if we are being honest it is a cut above the usual tedious Francorap we encounter on these trips across the channel. Watch the video all the way through as the production hurtles in a quite unexpected direction at the midway point.

As noted above although the Top 10 remains largely logjammed there is at the very least a new single set to crash its way to the top. I’ll wax far more lyrical about the differing fortunes of Harry Styles releases on the Chart Watch site this weekend, suffice to say that after a series of misfires the long-running success of Watermelon Sugar (which was a hit of differing sizes during the summers of both 2020 and 2021) means he approaches the promotion of his third album as a properly established solo star rather than “the bloke from One Direction who we are now expected to take seriously on his own”. Which was so frequently the problem at the beginning.

As It Was (a track that follows the fashion for brevity in pop, clocking in at a mere 2:45 in length) is top of the midweek charts with a sale more than double that of its nearest rival (Dave, inevitably) suggesting it is on course for a total of over 80,000 units by the end of the week. It will become only his second solo No.1 hit, arriving just a few weeks shy of five years since Sign Of The Times became his first.

On the albums front, The Red Hot Chili Peppers are in the lead with Unlimited Love with a chart sale that is (for now) ten times that of the No.2 record. Although of course these sales will be heavily front-loaded and the gap may well have narrowed by the weekend. Following the sad death of Tom Parker Most Wanted: Greatest Hits by his band The Wanted seems set to gatecrash the Top 10 as well.

I’ll sign off with the single that seems set to be the (very) distant second-highest new entry of the week. Gossip sites in America are suggesting this was an act of hubris by Shawn Mendes thinking he could release his own single head-to-head with Harry Styles and compete on level terms. Harry is top of the charts. Mendes will be lucky to make the Top 40.

The new UK charts are announced by Radio One from 4pm every Friday, can be seen in full on officialcharts.com and musicweek.com, and I’m now back on chart-watch.uk with my own detailed charts analysis later that same evening.