The first in a long series of completed X-books storylines hits this week… but let’s do the chart post before I turn my attention to the bursting dam.  Be warned… after the drought will come the backlog.  This is what happens when everything wraps up a storyline at once.  But first!

1.  Ed Sheeran & Justin Bieber – “I Don’t Care”

After last week’s static top 12, we have… a static top 10.  But only marginally!  “I Don’t Care” gets a fifth week at number one, but holds off “Old Town Road” by the equivalent of over 1,553 sales.  Given that we’re talking about records with streaming figures in the 8 millions, that’s not much.  “Old Town Road” has been sitting at number 2 for seven weeks now, and if it can actually make it back to number one – which is eminently possible – that will be quite something.

The other Ed Sheeran single, “Cross Me”, is still holding steady at 9.

8.  Chris Brown featuring Drake – “No Guidance”

As a lead artist, this is Chris Brown’s first top ten hit since 2015’s “Five More Hours” (where he got co-billing with Deorro).  If you’re counting guest appearances, there was his admittedly-prominent role on Lil Dicky’s number one “Freaky Friday” last year.  It’s the fourth single from his upcoming album “Indigo”, and since none of the others got above 15, it’s fairly safe to say this has made the top 10 thanks to Drake’s appearance – though it’s also a more of-the-moment record than most of Chris Brown’s stuff.  If you follow these sorts of things, this is apparently the final resolution of their long running feud, which I imagine must be terribly exciting.  The hook is sampled from “Before I Die” by Che Ecru, which only came out last year.

Just outside the top ten, the three-song cap is glitching away merrily for Lewis Capaldi, whose song “Bruises” suddenly entered the chart last week by overtaking “Grace” as his third biggest single – and just as quickly vanishes, leaving “Grace” to technically re-enter at number 12.  This must look very odd if you don’t know the chart rules.  “Wish You Well” by Sigala & Becky Hill climbs 24-25.

18.  Mabel – “Mad Love”

The follow-up to “Don’t Call Me Up” – which reached number 3, even though I thought it was sub-Dua Lipa – this is off to a reasonable start.  It’s a stronger single, but what do I know?

19.  MoStack featuring Dave & J Hus – “Stinking Rich”
39.  MoStack & Fredo – “I’m The One”

Tracks from his album “Stacko”, which enters the album chart at 3 – easily beating the number 16 position for his 2017 debut “High Street Kid”.  As you’d expect, “Stinking Rich” is the one with the big name guests, plus it has a great piano riff.  The official single, “Shine Girl” featuring Stormzy, climbs 15-13, maxing out his three song (though since the third is at number 39, it probably doesn’t matter).

21.  Avicii – “Heaven”

Technically this is a single from Avicii’s posthumous album “Tim”, though since it doesn’t have a video and the album itself is out this week, that seems to mainly amount to promoting it to radio.  It’s the track with Chris Martin from Coldplay guesting, and thus the one with obvious crossover potential beyond people who already like Avicii.  While the “Tim” album relies heavily on collaborators to complete Avicii’s unfinished work, “Heaven” is in a slightly different category: it’s a widely-bootlegged song which Avicii and Martin recorded in 2014, at the same time as Avicii worked on Coldplay’s “A Sky Full of Stars.”  And although it wasn’t released during his lifetime, Avicii did play it live fairly often, so he evidently rated it.  It’s about as legitimate a posthumous release as you’re going to get, even if it does sound awfully like Coldplay.

The album enters at number 7, maintaining his clean sweep of getting his studio albums into the top 10.

22.  Liam Gallagher – “Shockwave”

The lead single from his upcoming second solo album “Why Me?  Why Not?”.  This is almost exactly where the lead single from his previous album wound up in 2017 (“Wall of Glass”, which got to number 21).  It’s the sort of retro guitar stomper that we normally only reach on the album charts, and feels staggeringly out of place on a 2019 singles chart – but it’s a surprisingly decent record.

“One Touch” by Jess Glynne & Jax Jones climbs 30-23.

26.  AJ Tracey – “Ladbroke Grove”

This track from Tracey’s self-titled album nearly made the top 40 back in February as a cherrypicked album track, but it’s finally being promoted as a single now (unusually for 2019, months after the release of the album itself, which now increasingly seems to be the end of the promotional cycle).  There is of course a remix, featuring General Levy, of all people – the same guy who was having hits with M-Beat back in 1993.  The vocal sample is from Jorja Smith’s album track “Wandering Romance.”

“Easier” by 5 Seconds of Summer climbs 34-27, so maybe they really can have recurring hits.

30.  Young T & Bugsey featuring Aitch – “Strike a Pose”

Young T & Bugsey both previously appeared on “Ay Caramba”, the record that reached number 32 last year and was dubiously “credited” to Stay Flee Get Lizzy (not an artist at all, but the name of a mixtape promoted by a clothing brand).  Making his first appearance on the top 40, Aitch is a rapper from Manchester.  In this record, they enjoy looking at ladies.

And rounding us off, “3 Nights” by Dominic Fike climbs 38-31.

On the album chart, Lewis Capaldi’s “Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent” – are you sick of that title yet? – spends a fourth week at number one.  The highest new entry, at 2, is “Happiness Begins” by the Jonas Brothers; the single “Sucker” made number 4 in March.  This is their highest placing album, though comparisons with their 2008-9 run are maybe an apples and oranges matter – nonetheless, they got two studio albums to number 9 in that period.  Number 3 is the MoStack album, and we’ve covered that already.  And so we reach…

5.  The Divine Comedy – “Office Politics”

Another curious artefact of the album chart increasingly favouring legacy acts with loyal fanbases: this is actually the highest place for a Divine Comedy studio album, beating… um, 2016’s “Foreverland” (number 7).  That album plunged straight to number 77 in week two, which doesn’t bode well for this one.  Neil Hannon’s peak during his commercial prime was number 9 for 1998’s “Fin de Siecle“, which at least managed a month on chart.  And if you look beyond studio albums, he got to number 3 with the 1999 best-of “A Secret History”.

I really like the single, anyway.

Number 7 is the Avicii album mentioned above, and that takes us down to…

17.  Jamie Cullum – “Taller”

Now this is consistency: Jamie Cullum hasn’t missed the 16-to-20 range for an album in over a decade.  The title track above has much more grit than I was expecting.  It’s rather good.

20.  Bob Dylan – “The Rolling Thunder Revue – The 1975 Live Recordings”

A fourteen – yes, fourteen – CD box set of recordings from Dylan’s 1975 live shows, released to coincide with a Martin Scorsese documentary on Netflix.  This may seem like completist-only territory (and it is), but Dylan has a lot of completists.  His “Bootleg Series” of archive rarities is up to volume fourteen now, and volume fourteen alone ran to six discs.  A similar, though mercifully less extensive, selection of tracks from this tour was previously released as volume 5 of the Bootleg Series.

23.  Pink Floyd – “The Division Bell”

25th-anniversary vinyl release, and doesn’t that say a lot about how many copies you need to shift to make the middle of the album chart?  This was number 1 for a month on its release in 1994.

30.  Neil Young & Stray Gators – “Tuscaloosa”

More archive-trawling for completists: this is a Neil Young concert in Alabama in February 1973.  Officially this is volume four in the Neil Young Archives Performance Series, but that’s because Neil Young is perhaps the only person in the outside world to subscribe to Marvel’s numbering theories, meaning that he uses the numbering system of the Epic Collections – it’s called volume 4 not because it’s the fourth to be released, but because it was meant to be the fourth in chronological order.  Except it isn’t, because naturally two more recordings were found and added to the schedule after the numbering had already been announced, and ended up being assigned the numbers volume zero and volume two-and-a-half and… it’s a bit of a mess, really.

32.  Aurora – “A Different Kind of Human (Step 2)”

Continuing the theme of impenetrable numbering, this is (ahem) “the second chapter of the second studio album” by  Norwegian singer Aurora.  The first chapter was “Infections of a Different Kind (Step One)”, which ran to about half an hour and didn’t make the album chart, perhaps because it was too short to be eligible.  This thing has 11  tracks and runs for 40 minutes.  So quite why it isn’t officially an album in its own right – in the artist’s mind, anyway – is difficult to comprehend.

Despite what the official chart company’s website thinks, this Aurora has nothing to do with the electronica duo who had some scattered hits at the turn of the century.

35.  Santana – “Africa Speaks”

Santana’s previous album made number 4, but that seems to have had a novelty factor through the reunion of the band’s classic line-up.  Back to business as usual here, on the fringes of charting at all.