If you were expecting the top ten to be full of Whitney Houston songs – well, think again.  The thing about artists like Whitney Houston is that they’ve made an awful lot of records.  In her case, she’s had 32 hits in a 24-year chart career.  And that means the posthumous downloads tend to be scattered among the big songs, so that they swamp the lower reaches rather than dominating top ten of the chart.

There are, of course, quite a few Whitney Houston songs on this week’s chart.  But right at the top, it’s business as usual, with regular new singles entering at 1 and 2.

Number one is “Hot Right Now” by DJ Fresh featuring Rita Ora, another dance pop anthem along similar lines to his previous number 1 hit, “Can I Interest You In Buying Some Lucozade” “Louder”.

Not a great name, is it, DJ Fresh?  Sounds a bit like a character from a cautionary tale about underage smoking, written by a middle aged man who vaguely remembers the Fresh Prince.  But DJ Fresh has been around for years.  He started as a drum and bass producer in the mid-nineties, and the Official Charts Company maintains that he is still a drum and bass act (ever keen to stress the diversity of the British chart, you see), but recently he seems to have found a new niche in radio-friendly crossover pop hits.  This is his third hit single, the other one being “Gold Dust”, which is also quite good.  Despite this late career swerve towards pop, his records remain pretty distinctive, although you could argue that the last two singles are a bit too similar to one another for their own good.

Rita Ora was born in Kosovo, but her family moved to London almost immediately.  She’s cropped up before as a guest vocalist on a couple of Craig David tracks (which did absolutely nothing), but this is her first hit.  She’s got an album out later in the year, and needless to say, this is the first step in promoting it.

Number 2 is “Next To Me” by Emeli Sandé.  It’s an unusual choice of single, and a big change from the Massive Attack retro of her first single “Heaven”. Her album “Our Version of Events” enters at the top of the album chart this week, but she’s taken the risky move of releasing a single in the same week.  As a lead artist, her biggest single was “Heaven” (number 2 last year). But she was also on last year’s number 1 “Read All About It” with Professor Green, which appears on her album too, in an acoustic version with no rapping. (Ah, the Alicia Keys technique.) Oddly, the album version is entitled “Read All About It Part III”, despite there being no version I can trace bearing to be “Part II”. It might be an allusion to the Italian release of the song, where Sandé’s part was swapped out with an Italian vocal for local consumption.

Number 16 is “Starships” by Nicki Minaj, which was released on Valentine’s Day, so loses two days’ worth of sales.  No video for it yet, and it’s going to climb further anyway. Very much a straight pop song.  Accordingly to Wikipedia, producer RedOne has had the backing track lying around in a drawer since 2009 when the Sugababes rejected it, and that’s certainly easy to believe listening to it, though the dance anthem bits are decidedly odd.  (Here’s the Spotify link, if you want.)

Notable climbers this week: “One Thing” by One Direction jumps from 26 to 9 and “Mirror” by Lil Wayne goes from 38 to 23.

And so we turn to the Whitney Houston back catalogue.  While she had a lot of top ten hits, she actually only had four number ones in this country.  Three of them are on this week’s chart.  First up is “I Will Always Love You”, a song I’ve never much cared for (in any version), but it was number 1 for ten weeks in 1992 and it’s been a staple ballad ever since, so it’s no surprise to see it selling.

Houston’s version is from the soundtrack to the film “The Bodyguard”, as the video (officially credited to the dreaded Alan Smithee) makes abundantly clear.  The original was released by Dolly Parton in 1973, and is a bit more subdued.

Country doesn’t always travel well, and indeed the Dolly Parton original has never been a hit in the UK. The British did however shell out for a shockingly misconceived dance version by Sarah Washington (number 12 in 1993) and a rendition by morbidly obese talent show fly-by-night Rik Waller (number 6 in 2002), all of which speaks quite poorly of Britain, really.

The other top seller from the back catalogue is “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”, a number 1 for two weeks in 1987, and a pop classic in anyone’s book.

This too has also charted in a dodgy cover version – specifically, an off-the-peg dance version by Flip & Fill (number 13 in 2003).  It was also heavily sampled in one of the JAMs’ early mash-ups, which is veering way off topic, but what the hell.

And tailing in some way behind, at number 40, is the syrupy “One Moment In Time”, which topped the chart in 1988.  It was commissioned for the Seoul Olympics, hence the otherwise inexplicable video.

For those of you planning to attend a pub quiz soon, the Whitney Houston UK number one that didn’t make the charts this week was her debut “Saving All My Love For You” (1985).