For the seventh consecutive week, we have another new number one.  And since it drops to 3 in the midweeks, it’s a pretty safe bet that there’ll be an eighth on Sunday.

Yes, Pixie Lott is back, to start promoting her second album.  The single is “All About Tonight”, and it’s her seventh hit (they squeezed a lot of singles out of that debut album).  Pixie Lott is a classic example of the age-old promotional technique of insisting very loudly that somebody is a star until everybody gives up and believes you.  She had two number 1 hits in 2009, “Mama Do” and “Boys And Girls”, both of which had a sort of pseudo-retro-but-way-too-polished thing about them.  Passable enough songs, but produced into the ground.

This time round she has apparently decided that she’s the Saturdays, and reinvented herself as an electropop act.  This is a very formulaic piece of songwriting – people in the music industry seem to spend an awful lot of time waiting for the weekend considering they don’t work 9 to 5 jobs in the first place – but it’s a decent chorus and they’ve got the production right this time.

It’s no classic, but it is the best new release of the week, and it’s better than last week’s Example song (which drops to 5).  He’s number 1 on the album chart, though.

At number 3 we have the actual Saturdays, with “All Fired Up”.  This is a very strange choice of single, since structurally it’s barely a pop song at all; it seems to be a stab at a proper, outright dance track, chorus be damned.  It’s a grower, but I suspect there’s a chasm between the material and the audience who’d actually like it.

Number 4… look, this might take a while.  Feel free to get a drink.  Ready?

Okay.  At number 4 is “Collide”, credited for legal reasons to Leona Lewis & Avicii.

Leona Lewis requires no introduction; she won X Factor in 2006, and this is the lead single from her third album.  Avicii is one of the various names of a Swedish DJ also known as Tim Berg; his only previous hit was “Seek Bromance”, which made number 13 last November.  It is not altogether clear to me whether he actually even appears on this record.  Hence the lengthy explanation on which we shall now embark.

Recognise that piano riff on “Collide”?  Possibly heard it on an advert somewhere?  Well, it’s “Perpetuum Mobile” by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.  Here they are performing it on a BBC special in 1989.

(You’ll probably also recognise their tracks “Music for a Found Harmonium” and “Telephone and Rubber Band”, both of which have also been sampled for other people’s hits.)

Earlier in the year, Avicii released a track called “Penguin”, based on the “Perpetuum Mobile” sample.

He then licensed that track to Ministry of Sound in the UK.  For some reason Ministry of Sounds decided that what “Penguin” needed was a vocal line, so they invited a bunch of songwriters to come up with possible vocal lines.  (Can you see where this is going?)

“Collide” was one of the entrants in that competition.  It didn’t win.  The winner was a song called “Fade into Darkness” – which sounds like this, and has already been released under Avicii’s name in some other territories.

Somehow or other Syco ended up getting hold of “Collide” and decided it would make a good Leona Lewis track, despite the minor point that it was based on somebody else’s existing backing track.  Perhaps they figured that since that backing track was itself almost entirely based on a Penguin Cafe Orchestra sample, they could just license the sample themselves and be done with it.  Ministry of Sound disagreed, not least because they thought it’d get in the way of their own release – and so they sued.

Some sort of deal was evidently hammered out, since “Fade Into Darkness” seems to have vanished from the schedules, and Avicii has now been given a joint credit on the Leona Lewis single.  Which, at the end of the day, isn’t that good a record anyway.

After all that, we can race through the rest of this week’s new entries in short order.  Number 4 is “Called Out in the Dark” by Snow Patrol, the lead single from their next album.  Number 26 is “Cheers (Drink To That)” by Rihanna, which has been climbing from the lower reaches for three weeks now, and looks to be going further.  Rihanna also crops up at number 38, “Fly” by Nicki Minaj featuring Rihanna – which is also climbing further.  Something of a serial collaborator, Rihanna has now had 26 UK top 40 hits in a career that only goes back to September 2005.  And number 33 is “Neva Soft” by Ms Dynamite, who is apparently making records again.

Finally, from the “You’re kidding, right?” file, a special mention of number 12 on the album chart: Tonight’s the Night – The Best of John Barrowman.

Next week, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: One Direction release a single!