Now, One Direction had a good run.  Five albums over four years.  That’s a decent lifespan for their ilk.  But if you’re in a boy band, you should have an exit strategy.  At some point, you stop being boys.  And growing with the audience is easier said than done, because you tend to be the sort of thing the fans make a point of leaving behind as they get older.  Look at Take That – consigned to the “vaguely embarrassing” file until the audience were old enough not to be so self-conscious about liking them.

And if you’re a member of One Direction, you probably noticed that the media long since established the conventional wisdom that, come the inevitable split, the successful one – the really A-list one – was Harry Styles.  Good news for Harry Styles.  Less thrilling for the other four.

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Well, what an interesting month.  I think this year we’ll loosen up the format and go a bit more freeform, yes?  Alright.

So.  We left off with the Christmas chart, and with the Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Choir at number 1 with “A Bridge Over You”.  Normal service was swiftly resumed as “Love Yourself” by Justin Bieber, which had already been number one for three weeks, returned to the top for a further three.  Admittedly, that’s during the normal early-January dead season for new releases.  But since Bieber also had the immediately preceding number one (“Sorry”), the NHS Choir wind up as the sole week of respite in nine weeks of Justin Bieber.

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Ah, Christmas.  That wonderful time of the year when the chart abandons even the faintest pretence of making sense.

Let’s try starting with the month’s number ones, and then have a look at the rest.

4, 11 and 18 December 2015 – Justin Bieber, “Love Yourself”

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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.

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Five weeks.  Some of them very quiet.

2 October 2015: Sam Smith, “Writing’s On The Wall”

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So then.  As promised when I stopped the weekly chart posts, I’m going to do a monthly round-up of what’s been in the singles chart – plus, in this case, the last two charts of August, since I didn’t cover them either.  That’ll cover the number 1 singles and a brief run-down of what else has made the top 40 during this period, picking out anything actually notable.  Annoyingly for my purposes, it’s been a period with a heavy turnover of number one singles…

21 August 2015: Jess Glynne, “Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself” 

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Some housekeeping to start.   2015 is continuing to be a remarkably lethargic year for the singles chart – which seems to be in part a consequence of adding streaming data, which (mildly) favours records with enduring appeal and squeezes out what would otherwise have been one-week entries at the lower end of the top 40.  That also means that the records that are making the top 40 are tending to be less interesting on the whole.  That being the case, I’m thinking of putting this feature on hiatus for a bit, or perhaps converting it to a monthly round-up or something.  Instead, I thought I might do some posts on CBeebies, the BBC’s channel for young children.  Because I see a lot of CBeebies these days.  And several people have actually said they’d read it…

Anyhow.

39.  Tough Love featuring Ginuwine – “Pony (Jump On It)”

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If you were expecting Cilla Black to show up in this week’s singles chart, then let’s get your disappointment out of the way now.  “Anyone Who Had A Heart” did sell for a few days following her death at the start of the week, but it lands at 41, just outside our remit here.  Instead…

36.  Shaggy featuring Mohombi, Faydee & Costi – “I Need Your Love”

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It’s a podcast weekend, so check one post down for the latest episode (or, if you prefer, two posts down for another Chikara show).  Meanwhile, the singles chart remains pretty quiet, though this looks to be the latest week in that vein.

29.  Disclosure featuring Sam Smith – “Omen”

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Another astonishingly quiet chart – Radio 1 must be thanking their lucky stars they only have to fill 1h 45 with the run down these days.  There’s literally nothing going on in the bottom half of the chart at all.  So we pick up with…

18.  5 Seconds of Summer – “She’s Kinda Hot”

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