After last week’s bout of suspended animation, this week’s chart is rather more interesting.  There’s a new entry at number one – “Changed The Way You Kiss Me” by Example, the lead single from his third album.

Elliot Gleave (E.G., hence Example) started off as a rapper before dramatically shifting tack on his previous album to reinvent himself as an electro act.  This is his seventh hit – all of which followed the change of direction – but his first number one.  It’s certainly his best single to date, and it feels to me like a more successful version of what he was trying to do on the last album.  Leaving aside guest appearances, his biggest hit until now was “Kickstarts”, a perfectly good record which made number 3 a year ago, but doesn’t quite click in the same way the new track does.  Looks like he’s found himself a niche.  This has a tough fight to stay at number 1 for a second week (Calvin Harris is ahead on the midweeks), but it’s going to be up there.

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Don’t get too comfortable, there’s nothing much to say.  The charts really don’t get much less eventful than this.

Number 1 for a third week is “Give Me Everything” by Pitbull featuring Ne-Yo, Afrojack and Nayer.  It looks like it won’t manage a fourth.  Still, three weeks at the top is much longer than I’d have expected for this single, and for some reason that remains unfathomable to me, it’s one of the bigger hits of the year.

There are only two new entries this week, neither of them especially memorable.

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Looks like we’re heading into another fallow period on the singles chart.  There are only three new entries on the current chart, and judging from the midweeks, it’ll be the same on Sunday.

In fact, the big event this week is on the album chart, where Lady Gaga is unsurprisingly number one with “Born This Way.”  Perhaps nobody else feels like releasing records in the face of that juggernaut.  And with the release of the album, sales on the four singles have also tailed off a bit; “Hair” surprisingly crashes straight out of the top 40 after just one week.

With nothing much in the way of competition, it’s a second week at number 1 for “Give Me Everything” by (deep breath) Pitbull featuring Ne-Yo, Afrojack & Nayer.  In fact, the midweeks have it hanging on for three.  I’d kind of figured this for a middling single making it to number 1 in a quiet week, but maybe I’m missing something.

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Every so often a record gets to number 1 that I don’t get at all.  It’s not so much the really bad ones – at least they stand out.  It’s more the ones where I can’t quite figure out how they ever broke from the pack and got noticed.

That’s “Give Me Everything” by Pitbull featuring Ne-Yo, AfroJack & Nayer – a veritable horde of guest stars even by modern standards.  And people must like it – it’s been a slow burner, climbing 35-25-12-4-1.  The midweeks have it staying at the top for a second week.  I’m just kind of struggling to see what marks it out from a hundred other songs of its type.  And indeed, I see from Wikipedia that while it’s made the top 10 in plenty of countries, it’s only reached number 1 here.

But the people have spoken.  It’s Pitbull’s tenth hit (not bad considering that he first charted in 2007), and his first number one as a lead artist.  Technically, it’s his second number one, because of his co-credit on Jennifer Lopez’s “On The Floor” last month.  As a comics fan, I find that I derive much more enjoyment from his videos simply by pretending that he’s Grant Morrison.

Ne-Yo gets his fourth number one, following “So Sick” (2006), “Closer” (2008) and “Beautiful Monster” (2010) – he’s had a pretty impressive career for somebody who doesn’t have a huge media profile in the UK.  Nayer is apparently a singer and model, and this is her debut.  The internet seems to know virtually nothing about her, though I see she’s cropped up on at least one other Pitbull single before.  And Afrojack is a Dutch producer; his only previous chart credit was for his slightly (but only slightly) quirky single “Take Over Control”, which reached number 24 last year.

The highest new entry is “Save The World” by the Swedish House Mafia at 11.  It’s something of a change of direction for them – this is more of a straightforward song, compared to their previous hits “One” and “Miami 2 Ibiza”.   It doesn’t feel like it was intended principally for the clubs.  The video’s a cute idea, but it kind of promises more than it can deliver

More interesting, though, is “Hair” by Lady Gaga at number 13.  This was the fourth and final track to be released in advance of her new album, and once again it came out with no advance warning.  The result is to give her four singles in the top 20 – “Edge of Glory” at 6, “Judas” at 8, and “Born This Way” at 16.

That’s highly unusual.  Michael Jackson and John Lennon both managed it, but only by dying.  The last person to do it while continuing to breathe was Elvis Presley in 1957.  What this really tells you, though, is just how odd Lady Gaga’s promotional strategy for this album as been.  Plenty of acts could have achieved four concurrent singles if they’d released them in this short a period, but the conventional wisdom for decades has been to do precisely the opposite – wait for one single to fade and then stick out another one.  If the first single won’t fade of its own accord, delete it.

Lady Gaga’s approach is obviously attention-grabbing, but I suspect it works mainly on the novelty value – I’ll be surprised if we get other acts copying this.  You never know, though.  Interestingly, “Hair” doesn’t feature on the midweek charts at all.

Number 27 is “Right There” by Nicole Scherzinger, which ought to be in the dictionary next to “sub-Rihanna”.  It’s going to climb on Sunday, though.  There’s also a version with 50 Cent, for those who find the original just too darned subtle.

This week’s surprise hit is number 29 – “We Don’t Have To Take Our Clothes Off” by Jermaine Stewart.  It’s being used in a Cadburys advert. The original release was a number 2 hit in 1986.  Stewart had two lesser hits in 1988 (“Say It Again”, which has the most 80s video imaginable, and “Get Lucky”, which is slightly less 80s but does have some remarkable hairstyling) before dropping off the UK’s radar.  He died in 1997.

Number 34, but set to climb much further, is “California King Bed” by Rihanna, the token ballad from her current album.  The charitable view would be that she’s displaying her range, but more realistically, this is a glaring case of a record which exists solely to get her airplay on different American radio stations.  What the hell is it doing on the same album as “What’s My Name?”, “Only Girl In The World” or “S&M”?  It’s got a dad-rock guitar solo!

Finally, at a strangely appropriate number 40, there’s the Irish Eurovision entry, “Lipstick” by Jedward.  It’s actually not that bad a record – ignore the fact that it’s Jedward and you could see somebody else having a hit with it.  And it now has a second, vastly inferior video.  But they’re Jedward, they’re a national joke, and it’s hard to see them ever being successfully repackaged as anything else, no matter how effectively their limitations can be disguised in the studio.

Notable climbers this week: “I Need a Dollar” by Aloe Blacc is now at 4.  “Mr Saxobeat” by Alexandra Stan reaches 14, and is set to make the top 10 on Sunday.  “Bass Down Low” by Dev is at 18 and looks to be going further.  (It’s growing on me the more I hear it.)  And “I’m Into You” by Jennifer Lopez, which still isn’t officially a single, climbs ten places to 21.

I’ll be honest – “The Lazy Song” by Bruno Mars has been out for four weeks now and I’ve never actually sat through the whole thing.  But it climbs to number 1 this week, so I’ve dutifully watched it.

And, you know, it’s fine.  It’s catchy enough.  It’s got a decent video.  (The guys under the masks are Poreotics, the winners of season 5 of America’s Best Dance Crew.)  It’s a little bit different.  It’s kind of summery.  Personally, I find it a touch on the bland side.  But each to their own.

More remarkably, this is Bruno Mars’ fourth number one hit in less than a year, following “Nothin’ On You” with B.o.B., “Just The Way You Are”, and “Grenade.” There’s a decent amount of range there.  More to the point, four number one singles in a year is rare.  You might have thought it would happen more frequently in these days of serial collaborators notching up strings of “featuring” credits, but in fact, it hasn’t happened since 2000.

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Well, that was one I didn’t see coming.  The 2011 contest winner is an 80s-style duet from Azerbaijan – admittedly one with a decent chorus.  I wouldn’t have picked this as a standout, but I suppose it didn’t have much competition in its genre, which is always a help.

The contest actually credits the act as “Ell & Nikki”, but their names are Eldar Gasimov and Nigar Jamal.  Ms Jamal is an ex-pat living in London.  Azerbaijan only started entering in 2008, but they’ve made the top 10 every year since, so perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised by this.

Countries like Azerbaijan take winning the Eurovision seriously, and not without good reason.  They’re well aware that the rest of Europe doesn’t pay them much attention, couldn’t place them on a map, and vaguely suspects they’d be a poor choice of holiday destination.  But as winners of Eurovision 2011, they get to host the 2012 show.  That’s great publicity.  (For an illustration of this attitude, see the excellent documentary Sounds Like Teen Spirit about the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, and the segments about the girl from Georgia.  It’s on Netflix.)

Technically, they’ll put on a perfectly decent show.  The real question is whether they’ll screw it up with bad publicity from their human rights record.  This is, after all, a country where people are still jailed for mocking the President.  There is certainly a risk that they won’t get on well with the travelling retinue of Eurovision fans.  Of course, there’s also the possibility that a bit of international attention will encourage the authorities to get their act together; they’ll certainly have to relax their visa rules, which would currently prevent the Armenian entry from showing up at all.

Saturday is Eurovision Song Contest day, when people from around the continent of Europe gather around the television to wonder what on earth people in other countries were thinking when they submitted this stuff!

I won’t be following the show live, but having seen the semis, here’s a few quick pointers for the show.

The consensus seems to be that there isn’t a stand-out obvious winner this year.  My bet, though, would be on Sweden’s Eric Saade, the Scandinavian Zac Efron, which is a big electropop stomper, looked great at the semifinals, would actually sell in the real world, but manages to be Extremely Eurovision at the same time.

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This won’t take long – it’s another dead week on the chart.

LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” is number 1 for the fourth week, but it’s dodged a bullet.  The highest new entry, at number 3, is “Where Them Girls At” by David Guetta featuring Flo Rida and Nicki Minaj.  It could very easily have been number 1, but there was a screw-up with iTunes that cost it a couple of days sales there.

This is a rush-release after a bootleg remix of the song was leaked, so there isn’t a video yet.  Supposedly somebody obtained the vocal track illegally and put out a dodgy version with a rubbish backing track that Guetta wanted to distance himself from.  Whether this is true or not, the record company has certainly used it as the promotional hook for the track.  There doesn’t seem to be an audio version on YouTube (of decent quality), but let’s be honest, it sounds like a lot of other recent David Guetta records, so you’re not missing much.  Here’s the official trailer from Guetta’s YouTube channel, which gives you the general idea.

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After last week’s deluge of new entries, it’s a relatively quiet week this time round.  Lots of climbers, not much in the way of new songs.

LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” stays at number 1 for a third week, making it the second single of the year to do so.  The biggest challenge comes from Bruno Mars’ “The Lazy Song”, which climbs from 15 to 2 in its second week.  But as of right now, LMFAO are still number 1 on iTunes (with no new releases anywhere in sight), so they could well manage a fourth week to match Adele.  Also climbing in the top ten, albeit only by one place, are Chris Brown at 4, Snoop Dogg at 5 and Katy Perry at 6.

This week’s highest new entry is “Guilt” by Nero at number 8, which is another dubstep crossover record.  This is at the more commercial end of the spectrum, given the radio-friendly vocal – many purists apparently prefer their dubstep completely instrumental, I hear – but it’s a great piece of production, with the slow build to a ridiculously overpowered bassline about a minute in.

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Late in the week, I know, but at least I’m still in time to get this post done before the new chart on Sunday.

“Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO spends its second week at number one, and looks set for a third.  But even so, it’s a busy week, with ten new entries.  The turnover of hits has slowed down a lot in the last couple of years; swapping out a quarter of the chart used to be fairly routine, but we don’t see it as much in the digital era.

That’s the highest new entry – “Unorthodox” by Wretch 32 featuring Example, at number 2.  Does the video really need a definition of the word “unorthodox” in the first few seconds?  I have more faith in the viewers than that.  Anyway, this is the second hit for Wretch 32, who reached number 5 in January with “Traktor”.  It’s also the biggest hit for guest rapper Example, beating the number 3 peak of “Kickstarts” last year.

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