‘Tis the quietest of quiet weeks.  Seriously, this isn’t going to take long.

38.  Michael Molloy & Alex Evans – “Rise And Fall”

Michael Molloy was an 18-year-old aspiring songwriter who was killed in a coach crash last year while returning from the Isle of Wight festival; this is a demo he had previously recorded with partner Alex Evans.  It’s quite good, in fact.  If you’re wondering, that’s apparently Evans singing; Molloy wrote the song and is playing the guitar.

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Reviews will be coming in due course, but in the meantime, the great thing about chart posts is that you can generally make a good start on them in advance…

40.  Amelia Lily – “Party Over”

“Tell me, is the party over?” asks Amelia.

Well, let’s see.  “You Bring Me Joy”, number 2.  “Shut Up (And Give Me Whatever You Got)”, number 11.  This track, number 40.  Position on iTunes as of right this moment now – 103.

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After the excitement of last week, the mainstream media have packed up and gone home, and we’re back to business as usual.  Which means midweek releases, odd classical crossover acts, and three records by will.i.am.  One of them is “Scream and Shout”, still hanging in there at 35.

34.  will.i.am (featuring Miley Cyrus) – “Fall Down”

And one of them is this, which isn’t officially on YouTube, but you won’t have too much trouble finding it if you want to hear it.  It’s one of his less obnoxious songs, with a catchy whistling hook, though it still ultimately ends up in the territory of Flo Rida with added electro and orchestral pretensions.  The last minute or so is completely off the deep end.  Weirdly, this isn’t being downloaded as an album track – he simply released two singles in the same week and only promoted one of them.

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The podcast is just below, so I’m kind of deluging you with material today, but this seems like a day to try and get the chart post up quickly.

This week: Margaret Thatcher dies, the chart goes berserk, and the BBC makes an incredible hash of the whole situation.

Where there is harmony, let us bring discord.

35.  The Notsensibles – “I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher”

Margaret Thatcher died on Monday following a stroke, at the age of 87.  To call her divisive would be an understatement.  Everyone can agree that she’s an important historical figure – the first female Prime Minister, the longest serving of the post-war era, and somebody who actually succeeded in remaking the British political culture in ways that have stuck.  Where people disagree, and passionately, is on whether this was a good thing.

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After last week’s improbable departure into the realms of 90s pop, normal service is now resumed.

(Briefly.)

40.  Imagine Dragons – “It’s Time”

Are Imagine Dragons on a crusade to provide fodder for chart trivia collectors?  The band had their first UK hits in December when “Radioactive” and “Hear Me” both made the lower reaches of the top 40 in the same week.  In fact, that was largely the result of a misfired promotion: “Radioactive”was the song everyone wanted, but it was released as the B-side to “Hear Me”.  So, under chart rules, if you downloaded “Radioactive” alone, it was credited as a sale of “Radioactive” – but if you downloaded the entire single, it was credited to “Hear Me”.

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Bit of housekeeping to start: we recorded the podcast tonight, so it’ll be up tomorrow.  X-Axis… probably Monday or Tuesday.  But in the meantime, here’s a chart worth spending a bit of time on.

Regular readers will have noticed that one thing I like about the current chart rules is that literally anything can chart if the great British public suddenly feel an urge urge to buy it, as long as it’s lurking somewhere in the iTunes catalogue.  If enough people succumb to the same collective madness, literally anything can be number one.

Behold a peerless example.  This one’s going to take some explaining for the overseas readers.

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And we’re back.  I was originally planning to chuck this week’s new entries in with the post for tomorrow’s chart, but it seems that in my absence the country has had one of its periodic fits of lunacy that means there will be plenty to say in that column already.  So instead, I’m going to briefly run through last week’s largely uneventful chart to get us up to date…

35.  Jakwob (featuring Maiday) – “Fade”

The first hit for James Jacob, a producer from Hereford who some of the evening shows on Radio 1 have been vaguely supporting for a couple of years now.  It’s a pretty little thing, but it’s going no further.  I’ve never heard of singer Maiday, but she’s got a couple of videos of her own on YouTube, neither of which seems to have made a huge impact, but then they don’t actually seem to have been followed up by a commercial release – here’s “Breathe”.

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Let’s get straight to it, shall we?

38.  Blake Lewis – “Your Touch”

Blake Lewis was the runner-up of American Idol in 2007, since when he’s released a couple of albums in the States to sharply diminishing returns.  (If Wikipedia is to be believed, his debut album sold 309,000, and the follow-up managed just 10,000.)  With this, the lead track from his third album, Lewis hurls himself on top of the passing dubstep bandwagon and clings on for all his might.  It’s not horrible, actually, but it’s clearly the work of someone chasing trends.

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A pretty quiet week, to be honest, but there are a few points of interest in here.

30.  The Stereophonics – “Indian Summer”

Hey, these guys are still going!  I always regarded the Stereophonics as meat-and-potatoes indie-rock plodders at the best of times, but they’ve been around since 1997, so they must be doing something right.  This is the lead single from their new album “Graffiti on the Train”, which enters the album chart this week at 3.  It seems to show them mutating into a lower-impact Bon Jovi.  Is this what they call “growing old gracefully”?

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It’s not the busiest week, but there are a few interesting records here nonetheless.

Admittedly, not so much this first one.

39.  Paramore – “Now”

Well, that was non-specifically discontented.  It’s alright, but I think they wrote better tunes when they were doing straight power pop.  It’s their 6th UK hit; the biggest was “Ignorance”, which made number 14 in 2009.  Sales on this must have been hugely frontloaded by fan purchases, since it was at 23 in the midweeks.

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