It is time once again to bow before our overlord Simon Cowell.  Yes, just in time for the new series of X Factor… One Direction are back.  And this time they’re McFly!  Well, kind of, anyway.

With X Factor about to launch in America, a whole new nation is, one suspects, about to be exposed to the dubious charms of the ad hoc group.

You see, the X Factor has four categories – boys, girls, over-whatever-age-it-is-this-year, and groups.  One judge mentors each category.  This sounds like a vaguely sensible idea, except for one thing: it’s a lot harder to find decent groups than decent individual singers, for fairly obvious reasons.  The groups are almost invariably the weakest division, and in Britain the show has pretty much given up pretending otherwise.  JLS, who actually did audition as a fully-formed group, were a notable exception.  But for the last few years, the show has resorted to padding out the group category by assembling its own boy- and girl-bands from auditionees rejected from their own categories.  Each year this is routinely presented as a sudden and surprising decision by the judges.  The editors of the X Factor are nothing if not easily surprised.

One Direction were the makeweight boy band for 2010, and they had at least one advantage over their forerunners: at least they looked like a group.  David Arnold branded them “Five Guys Named Bieber”, which is a fair description of how they were presented on the show.  And for a change, the all-important teenage girl audience actually liked this bunch – even if Twitter was faintly bemused by the group’s assigned name.  (“Wand Erection…”?)  They made it to the finals, and came third.  Their female counterparts Belle Amie got knocked out in week four.

Now, in time to promote their album on the live shows, One Direction are back, and they dutifully go straight to number one with a single that’s actually quite decent in a Disney Channel sort of way.  There is in fact a gap in the market for a boy band right now; the Wanted could do with some competition.  Cowell might be on to something here.

This is the eighth straight week in which we’ve had a new number one (and the midweeks say we’ll make it nine on Sunday).  Technically it breaks an unusually long run of nine consecutive number one singles by UK artists, since one member is Irish, though I suspect 80% British will be good enough for most people who care about such things.

This week’s two notable climbers are “Cheers” by Rihanna at 15 (up from 26) and “Fly” by Nicki Minaj ft Rihanna at 26 (up from 38).  Both are still climbing in the midweeks, so evidently having two singles out at once is doing Rihanna no harm.

The other new entries are quite some way down, and mostly logjammed at the bottom end of the chart.  Number 20 is “AKA… What A Life!” by Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, which is officially the second single from his solo album, but doesn’t actually have a video yet.  What it does have is a fairly terrible Vauxhall advert which the company rather astoundingly describes as “celebrating our proud sponsorship of the home nations football teams”, despite being entirely about England.  Strangely enough, this sort of thing tends not to go down very well in Scotland, Ireland or Wales.

Number 28 is “Days Are Forgotten” by Kasabian, who haven’t been around for a couple of years.  Not much has changed; they still write a decent hook, they still get a bit plodding at time, but they do seem to have eased off on the earnestness a bit.  The album “Velociraptor” is number one in the midweek charts.

Number 31 is “Without You” by David Guetta featuring Usher, one of the preview tracks for Guetta’s album that went largely unnoticed in its first week, but is now starting to take off.  Probably because they released an incomplete lyric video last week.  It’s going to climb.

At 33, “Go” by Delilah is the solo debut for a woman who did guest vocals on a Chase & Status single, “Time”, back in April.  Loosely based on “Ain’t Nobody” by Chaka Khan (number 8 in 1984).  Odd choice of single – it’s not exactly a dancefloor anthem, more of a gentle shimmery number.

Number 38 is a slow start for “You and I” by Lady Gaga, though it is the fourth single from her album.  It’s another of her eighties-soft-rock songs, which she doesn’t normally release as singles.  It’s going up in the midweeks, but not by much, and I’m not sure it’s necessarily what the public expects from her.  Though the video is, well, more what you’d imagine.

Number 39 is a re-entry for “Cannonball” by Damien Rice, which scraped the top 20 back in 2004.  It’s an X Factor audition piece, needless to say, and it’s going to shoot up the chart on Sunday, so I’ll come back to it then.  And number 40 is a surprisingly muted entry for “Body & Soul” by Tony Bennett & Amy Winehouse, the posthumous single which was recorded for Bennett’s duets album.  Admittedly, it was a midweek release (timed to coincide with Amy’s birthday), but still.

This may not be the last we hear of her.  There was an uncompleted new album, which the record company had apparently knocked back; one suspects they might revisit that decision, no doubt in a wholly sincere newfound appreciation of its merits.  As for Tony Bennett, this (just) returns him to the top 40 for the first time in over 45 years.  His biggest UK hit was “Stranger in Paradise”, a number 1 hit in 1955.  Few would have bet on his career continuing beyond Amy Winehouse’s.