With the race for Christmas Number 1 over, and the country still on holiday, the week between Christmas and New Year is traditionally a dead one, so far as the charts are concerned.  It’s not so much that you can’t buy records – the vast majority of singles are now sold as downloads, so it makes no difference that the shops are closed on public holidays.  It’s more that radio and TV aren’t very interested in new music at this time of year, so it’s a bad time to release singles.  Occasionally a band with a loyal fanbase try to take advantage of the lull to snatch a number one, but not this year.

Nonetheless, we do have a change at the top, as the Christmas number one contenders have flared out rather more quickly than you might expect.  And so this week’s number one is…

…“Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga, which was already number one three weeks ago.  It spent the last two weeks at number 3, behind Joe McElderry and Rage Against the Machine.  But they’re tailing off… while “Bad Romance” just keeps on selling.  In fact, this is its tenth week on the chart, six of them spent in the top five.  In many ways, it’s a more representative number one single than either of the last two.  As it happens, Lady Gaga also had the first number one of 2009 (“Just Dance“), and the biggest selling single of 2009 (“Poker Face“), so it seems appropriate that she gets to kick off 2010 as well.

Joe McElderry is still at number 2, largely on the strength of physical sales.  On the download chart, he’s at a rather less impressive number 7.  This ought to be cause for slight concern, because chances are he won’t be able to rely on physical sales so much with his future releases.  Frankly, there aren’t many places to buy CD singles any more, so unless you’ve got an oddity like a charity single or an X Factor coronation – something that might get stocked in supermarkets and the like – you’re largely dependent on downloads.

As for Rage Against the Machine, they swandive from last week’s number 2 to this week’s number 40 – which makes me wonder whether their sales last week weren’t because people discovered the song and bought it on its merits, but because a ton of people downloaded it on Sunday 19 December, unaware that the chart week had already closed at midnight.

The only proper new entry on this week’s chart, and thus the first new entry of 2010, is “Take That” by Wiley and Chew Fu.  Wiley is an veteran of the genre that ended up being called grime, despite his best efforts to persuade people to call it “Eskibeat.”  Chew Fu is an American remixer, getting his first hit in his own right.  Not exactly a radio-friendly number (and they seem to have done an even less accessible edit for the video), it lands at number 22.  I like it.  It’s silly.

That may be the only new entry, but thanks to the Christmas singles dropping out, and tons of “review of the year” programming on radio and television, the lower end of the chart sees a veritable slew of re-entries for records that were big hits a few months back (plus a couple which were still hanging around just outside the chart).  I’m not linking to videos for all of these, but making a probably-brief return this week are…

• “Sex on Fire” by Kings of Leon at 30, a number 1 from 2008 which has now spent 67 weeks in the top 75.
• “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga at 32, the biggest selling single of last year.
• “Sexy Bitch” by David Guetta & Akon at 33, another former number 1.
• “Beat Again” by JLS at 34, a number 1 from July.
• “I Need You” by N-Dubz at 36, which peaked at number 5 in November and was hovering just outside the chart already.
• “I Can Transform Ya” by Chris Brown at 37.  This peaked at 26 in November, looked to be well on its way out of the top 75, and is possibly the oddest re-entry.
• “Break Your Heart” by Taio Cruz at 38, a number 1 hit from September.
• And the apparently perennial “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol at 39, re-entering from nowhere after being announced as the most played record in Britain of the last decade (quite an achievement considering it wasn’t even released until 2006 – though it’s worth pointing out that these figures come from the PPL, and so they include music being played in shops and so forth).  This gives it a staggering total of 95 weeks in the singles chart, though it’s still some way off the record of 122 set by “My Way.”