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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Another quiet week for new releases, this time for very good reason.  This chart covers the week of the Brit Awards, the UK’s equivalent of the Grammies, which was always going to dominate the news cycle, and always spawns a few unlikely midweek hits thanks to re-entries from winners and people who performed on the show.  Plus, the only genuine major release of the week is a high profile charity single, and nobody wants to go up against that.  So, not much going on.

But here’s what there is.

39.  Robbie Williams – “Candy” 

A re-entry because he performed it at the Brits.  Originally a number one last year.

38.  Tyler James (featuring Kano) – “Worry About You”

Tyler James is the closest The Voice UK came to discovering a star, which is to say that his previously comatose career has at least begun to stir again.  These things are relative, though – “Worry About You” only just makes the top 40, even with the support of Radio 1 (who are kind of obliged).  All that said, it’s an okay record and really did deserve to go higher.

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After a few exceptionally quiet weeks, we’ve suddenly got a real flurry of activity, with almost a quarter of the chart made up of new entries.

37.  Zedd (featuring Foxes) – “Clarity”

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Don’t get too comfortable.  We won’t be here long.  The singles market remains weirdly moribund as we head into February, with only a single new entry on this week’s chart.  We do have some big climbers, but in terms of actual new records, you’ll have Fall Out Boy or you’ll have nothing.

40.  Jake Bugg – “Lightning Bolt”
38.  Nickelback – “How You Remind Me”
36.  One Direction – “Little Things”
30.  The Fray – “How To Save A Life”

Since something’s got to replace the records dropping out of the charts, we have a few re-entries down at the bottom.  Jake Bugg was still floating around just outside the top 40.  “Little Things” is probably here because it was used on Dancing on Ice last weekend.  I’ve no clue what the others are doing here.  The Fray made number 4 with this single six years ago; Nickleback’s “How You Remind Me” dates back to 2002.  Something has suddenly made them pick up sales again but I honestly don’t know what.  Any suggestions, let us know in the comments thread.

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This week: basically nothing comes out, but some other records do climb!  Exciting, I know!

33.  Justin Bieber (featuring Nicki Minaj) – “Beauty and a Beat” 

Re-entry – this dropped out of the top 40 last week.  I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s picked up a few downloads from the version available on his “Believe Acoustic” album.

30.  Amelia Lily – “Shut Up (And Give Me Whatever You’ve Got)” 

I don’t normally mention fallers, but it’s worth flagging up that this drops 19 places on its second week – not a promising sign for  Xenomania’s latest attempt to find a new vehicle.

29.  Droideka – “Get Hyper”

Droideka is Ellis Carter, a teenager from Cambridge named after a relatively obscure Star Wars concept, and this is a dubstep track that (as best I can figure out) he initially put out as a copyright-free track a year or so back.  This is a rather more polished version, though.  Bouncy little number, kind of sounds like something that might turn up on a Flash game soundtrack.  It’s been climbing from the lower reaches for a couple of weeks now but I’m not entirely sure why, to be honest.

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