Okay, let’s get this month’s chart post out promptly!  Um… new Watch With Father post probably over the weekend or early next week,  and some sort of state of the X-books type thing maybe in the pipeline too.  I know.

Meanwhile, hope you like the words “Justin Bieber”, because they’re going to be cropping up a lot.

6 November 2015: Adele, “Hello”

A second week at number one, and this is a juggernaut of a record.  Justin Bieber, stuck at number two for the second week, would normally have walked it to number one with his sales of 48,000 and his 4.41m streams.  But Adele shifted 121,000 and had streams of 5.78 million.  Nobody was going to match that.  And nobody really tried, with the highest new entry coming down at 10 for “Focus” by Ariana Grande.

Pleasant enough, I guess, but it’s a lot of production bells and whistles (and some neat brass hooks) trying to liven up a pretty average song.  Grande is in an odd position in the UK market – she had two number 1 hits last year, but both come with an asterisk.  “Problem” had Iggy Azalea on it, and “Bang Bang” had Jessie J and Nicki Minaj, all of whom have more consistent chart records than Grande does.  Without the big name stars, she’s never previously made it above number 16.  So in that sense, I guess she’s moving in the right direction.  This is the lead single from her next album, and the uncredited male voice is Jamie Foxx.  It was outside the top 20 after four weeks.

Also this week:

• “Reality” by Lost Frequencies and Janieck Devy at 29… oh, and that’s it.  Quiet week.  Lost Frequencies is the Belgian producer who had a number 1 with “Are You With Me” in July.  That was a remix of a country track, and this is more of the same, except with an original song.  It dropped out of the top 100 after three weeks, but hey, at least it scores him off the one-hit wonder list.  Janieck Devy is a Dutch singer and actor.  YouTube brings up a surprising number of live performances from the Dutch media circuit, which is all very well if you’re the bloke with the guitar, but requires a lot of gamely swaying from side to side from the producer himself.

13 November 2005: Adele, “Hello”.

An entirely unsurprising third week for Adele, with Bieber remaining stuck at 2.  The highest new entry – and boy, there were loads this week – is “Sax” by Fleur East at 3.

Fleur East was the runner-up in last year’s X Factor (and a member of a girl band who got eliminated in the first week back in series 2).  As is the norm, she got signed anyway, and this is her first single as a member of the Cowell Empire.  It’s still in the top 5.  You might recall that last year’s actual winner, Ben Haenow, could only get to number 21 with his single last month.  At least that track managed five weeks in the top 40, but it’s pretty clear who the priority act is here.

Unusually for an X Factor act, she has some prior professional releases to her credit, from a short stint signed to Strictly Rhythm in 2012.   But that’s probably where the state of the unsigned talent pool has got to, twelve series in.  X Factor is now in the odd phase of its history where everyone knows that it’s in terminal decline, but it’s still big enough to merit its place in the prime time line-up.  ITV recently picked up the rights to The Voice, which has never really worked on the BBC, but might have a better run without X Factor around.

Also this week:

• “In2” by WSTRN at 4.  Trio from West London, hence the name.  Debut single.  Not bad, actually.
• “Half the World Away” by Aurora at 11.  It’s November – it must be time for the John Lewis Christmas Advert and its cover version soundtrack!  Aurora is a teenager from Norway, and has no connection with the dance act of the same name that had four hits at the turn of the century, including a number 5 cover of “Ordinary World”.  The original of “Half the World Away” is the B-side to Oasis’s 1994 single “Whatever”; it’s now best known as the theme tune  to the sitcom The Royle Family.  This one is already nearly out of the top 40.
• “Adventure of a Lifetime” by Coldplay at 14.  This is the lead single from the next Coldplay album, and apparently they’ve been listening to a bit of Daft Punk.  Only a bit, though.  Number 14 might seem low, but they’re an albums act now – the singles from the last album all clustered around here too.
• “Take Me Home” by Jess Glynne at 20.  This is the fifth single from her album, but it was  released as a charity single for the BBC’s Children in Need appeal, which led to it jumping to 6 in its second week out.
• “I’ll Show You” by Justin Bieber at 32.  A promotional single for the album, which came out the following week – more of that in a moment.  It climbed to 15 the following week.  The video is simply Justin Bieber wandering around Iceland.  It also answers the question “What’s Dappy’s stylist up to these days?”
• “History” by One Direction at 37.  Album track, but it’s a track they’ve been doing on TV shows to promote the album.  It’s a fairly obvious “goodbye, fans” number.

20 November 2015: Justin Bieber, “Sorry”

After spending three weeks locked at number 2 behind Adele, Bieber finally edged her out in streams, and made it to the top.  Five years after he first charted, he got his first two number ones within two months of each other.  Partly, it’s that he always had a big streaming audience and the change in chart methodology helps him.  But partly, his reinvention as a post-teen act has simply worked, and broadened his appeal.  His records used to flare out after all his fans bought them in week one; now he’s hanging on behind Adele for a month.

The album “Purpose” came out in this week, and arguably becomes the first album of the streaming era to break the singles chart.  Three tracks from the album were already on the chart: there’s “Sorry”; there’s his previous number 1 “What Do You Mean”, which is still sitting at 5; and there’s “I’ll Show You”, climbing to 15.  They’re now joined by “Love Yourself” at 3, “Company” at 32, “Mark My Words” at 35, and “The Feeling” at 38.  And “Where Are U Now” re-enters at 33.

That’s eight singles on the top 40 at the same time.  The record is 13, but that was Michael Jackson after he died.  The last living act to come close to this was Elvis Presley, who managed to get seven different singles into the top 30 during one week in 1957.  (Would he have beaten Bieber if the chart had gone down to 40 in those days?  Who knows?)  What’s more, Bieber has three singles in the top 5, which hasn’t been done since 1981.  And again, John Lennon had to die to do that.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that Justin Bieber has suddenly become an act on the par with a recently deceased Beatle.  The main reason so few artists have done this is that record companies used to try to avoid it, by deleting earlier singles in order to avoid distracting from later ones.  So it’s only in the download era that this sort of scenario has become possible again.  But that still goes back a good few years now, and we’ve not seen anything like this.

Perhaps because some of the audience was fractured into downloading and streaming individual tracks, the album itself actually enters at number 2.  Funny, that.  The other new entries from this week’s chart:

• Chunky” by Format:B at 29.  German dance record.  The sample is from Huey Lewis & The News.
• Eyes Shut” by Years & Years at 40.  A remarkably slow start, given that their previous two singles got to 1 and 2.  It climbed the following week, but only to 32.

27 November 2015: Justin Bieber, “Sorry”

A second week at number 1, and a fifth in the top two.  Meanwhile, “Love Yourself” climbs to 2, making Justin Bieber the first act to have concurrent number 1 and 2 singles since Madonna did it with “Into the Groove” and “Holiday” in 1985.  Oh, and album track “No Pressure” climbs from 42 to 38 to break the record he set last week and bring his total of concurrent chart hits to 9.  Meanwhile, this week’s highest new entry is “Over and Over” by Nathan Sykes at 8.

Nathan Sykes was a member of always-the-bridesmaid boy band The Wanted.  This entirely pleasant piano ballad is his second solo single, following “Kiss Me Quick”, which got his solo career off to an unpromising start by entering at 14 and vanishing after a week.  This time he had the advantage of promoting it on X Factor, but it’s also just a better single.

Just one other new entry this week:

• “When We Were Young” by Adele at 29.  It’s an album track, but it’s the one she’s been doing on TV, and there’s a live video for it, so there you go.