RSS Feed
Feb 24

Charts – 23 February 2018

Posted on Saturday, February 24, 2018 by Paul in Music

It’s the week of the Brit Awards, and you know what that means…  very little, because the promotional efforts are elsewhere, and the Brit Awards themselves only come midway through the week.  So its only visible impact is over on the album chart, where it gives a boost to a bunch of already-released albums.  This means a very, very, very quiet chart…

1.  Drake – “God’s Plan”

Five weeks, and it could be here for a while to come.  Streams are still growing, and lead the market by a mile.  This seems to answer the theory that “One Dance” spent an age at number one because it didn’t have a video, meaning that people who would otherwise have watched it on YouTube (which doesn’t count towards the chart) went instead to the audio streaming services (which do).  “God’s Plan” got a video last week, and it only helped.  Apparently any diversion effect is more than outweighed by the publicity.

Our highest new entry this week is…

37.  Zedd, Maren Morris & Grey – “The Middle”

Zedd and Grey have collaborated before, on Hailee Steinfeld’s “Starving”, which made the top 10 in 2016.  This is a serviceable follow-up, with a decent hook and not much else to write home about.  They’ve gone for an entirely straight performance video, with staging that wouldn’t look too out of place on the X Factor results show.  It’s unusually direct.  Maren Morris, making her first appearance on the UK top 40, is a country singer; perhaps she’s making a move to broaden her audience.

39.  Hailee Steinfeld & BloodPop® – “Capital Letters”

There’s a coincidence – Hailee Steinfeld again.  She’s had a couple of minor hits since “Starving”, but nothing that’s got above 30.   BloodPop® – the ® is silent – is mainly a remixer and songwriter, but he’s cropped up with an artist credit once before, when he got equal billing on Justin Bieber’s “Friends” back in September.

The song is from the soundtrack of Fifty Shades Freed.  It’s Ellie Goulding-style stuff; like a lot of Fifty Shades singles, it’s a lyric about obsessive infatuation which vaguely ticks the movie box without being in any way out of the normal boundaries of pop songs about love, and it has a euphoric chorus to let us all know how lovely said obsessive infatuation is.  If you were thinking Fifty Shades might lend itself to something darker, well, the soundtrack compilers don’t think so.

This week’s climbers:

  • “IDGAF” by Dua Lipa climbs to 3, after a month stuck at 4.
  • “Feel It Still” by Portugal. The Man moves 6-4.
  • “All The Stars” by Kendrick Lamar & SZA climbs 11-5, giving Kendrick his biggest hit as a lead artist.  (If you count his guest appearances, then Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” got to 4.)
  • “Friends” by Marshmello & Anne-Marie climbs 19-9 – that’s Marshmello’s third top ten hit since September, and it matches the peak of Anne-Marie’s only solo hit, “Ciao Adios”, last spring.
  • “Pray For Me” by The Weeknd & Kendrick Lamar climbs 13-11.
  • “Fine Line” by Mabel featuring Not3s climbs 17-16 (swapping places with Not3s’ own single “My Lover”).
  • “The Greatest Show” by Hugh Jackman, Keala Settle, Zac Efron & Zendaya finally reaches 20, having taken six weeks to scramble its way from 23.
  • “Look Alive” by Blocboy JB featuring Drake climbs 23-21.
  • “Say Something” by Justin Timberlake featuring Chris Stapleton rebounds to a new peak of 22, which should cause some sighs of relief – something from this album is getting traction.
  • “Mine” by Bazzi climbs 37-27.
  • “Check” by Kojo Funds featuring Raye moves 32-30.
  • “Sick Boy” by the Chainsmokers reaches a new high of 35, a month after it debuted at 40.

On the album chart, The Greatest Showman soundtrack gets a seventh week at number 1, and there’s only a couple of outright new entries…

6.  The Temperance Movement – “A Deeper Cut”

Scottish blues rock.  It’s their third album, but the first to reach the top 10.  They don’t seem to make videos, so here they are playing on Scottish local TV.

28.  Belle & Sebastian – “How To Solve Our Human Problems – Pt 1-3”

This is simply a compilation of three EP releases, hence the relatively low placing – a new Belle & Sebastian studio album can normally be relied upon to make the top 10.

Bring on the comments

  1. Brendan says:

    Is it true Mr Brightside has been in the UK top 100 charts since 2004? I’ve just got this question wrong in a pub quiz (Australia) and it blows my mind. Obviously, I’ve turned to the X-axis/H2A for clarification.

  2. Paul says:

    Short answer: no, it’s not true.

    I’ve heard this one before. The claim that it’s been on the chart continually since 2004 seems to be a garbled version of a claim that Vice made in an article last year, when they said that it had appeared on the top 100 at least once in every calendar year since 2004. https://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/article/pg78ky/the-killers-mr-brightside-not-left-uk-charts-since-2004

    However, that’s not quite true either. It’s remarkably close to being true, but the song didn’t make the top 100 at all in 2006 or 2011. (And it only appeared on the very first chart of 2005.)

    What IS true is that “Mr Brightside” has been on the Top 100 almost continually since the streaming era began, and that a BPI report last year claimed that it was the most-streamed song to have been released before 2010.

  3. Brendan says:

    Thanks Paul. I’ll be sure to pass the information on to the MC who swindled me on Sunday.

Leave a Reply