As you might have gathered, I was a bit behind on these even before going on holiday.  Since then, there’s been quite the turnover of number one singles – we’ve had a run of new releases going in at the top and then promptly dropping down the top ten, in a rather unwelcome return to the bad old days of pre-digital charts.  So, rather than try and plough through all these singles in one go, I’ll take them a week at a time.

We start with Sunday 15 August 2010, when the number 1 single was in fact a climber…

That’s “Club Can’t Handle Me” by Flo Rida featuring David Guetta. It climbed to number 1 on its third week, and it’s yet another in the stream of Guetta’s pop-dance anthems.  He’s certainly been having a good year.  To be honest, since they’re all along fairly similar lines, it’s tricky to find new things to say about them.  Not that he’s making the same record time and again, but he’s certainly got a distinctive style.  And it seems to be the sound of 2010, at least where straight pop music is concerned.

The song is from the Step Up 3D soundtrack.  It’s Flo Rida’s third number 1, following “Right Round” and his guest appearance on Alexandra Burke’s “Bad Boys”.  For Guetta’s, it’s his fourth number 1 as a credited artist, the others being “When Love Takes Over” with Kelly Rowland, “Sexy Chick” with Akon, and “Gettin’ Over You” with a cast of thousands.

“Club Can’t Handle Me” was something of a surprise number 1, because the midweeks had “Missing You” by the Saturdays at the top.  In the event, the single slipped to number 3 by the end of the week, leaving the girl group still agonisingly short of their first number one.  That’s pretty bad luck, considering they’ve now had eight hits, mostly clustered right at the top of the charts.  They’ve made number two twice.

The song is a rather maudlin mid-Atlantic radio ballad, indiscriminately drenched in a ridiculous degree of autotune, as if somebody hasn’t noticed that it’s in the wrong genre.  The Saturdays actually can sing, so it’s difficult to understand what the producer was thinking, other than to blindly follow the herd.  Even the video is so generic as to verge on self-parody.

“Missing You” was the lead single from a mini-album, “Headlines!”, which seems to exist mainly so that the band would have some product on the shelves to tie in with their reality TV show Saturdays 24/7 (optimistically assuming that somebody might stumble upon it on ITV2).  Reportedly the album has better tracks on it, which makes the choice of lead single especially mystifying.  The Saturdays have done far better than this in the past, such as their early single “Up”, and they really need to choose their material better if they’re going to step into the shoes of Girls Aloud or the Sugababes.

The other new entries for the week:

• “In My System” by Tinchy Stryder at number 10.  This is the lead single from his third album, which makes its chart placing a bit disappointing.  His last album had two number one hits on it.  Still, it’s a fifth top 40 hit, and he’s still got a bit more edge than some of the other artists who’ve made the crossover from grime to mainstream pop.

• “The Writer” by Ellie Goulding at number 19.  The fourth single from her heavily hyped debut album, and her third hit (the first single was a limited release).  Goulding hasn’t quite made the mass market breakthrough that the record industry was hoping for, but she’s doing okay.  She’s a bit MOR and overproduced for my tastes, and there’s a slightly calculated quality to her.  The video isn’t embeddable, but hardcore fans wishing to perform a pilgrimage may wish to note that it’s filmed at the Happisburgh Lighthouse, “the oldest working lighthouse in East Anglia.”  (Thanks, Wikipedia.)
• “Brainwashed” by Devlin at number 31.  The chart debut for James Devlin, a rapper from Dagenham.  Odd record, this – the verses seem to be going for credibility with his core audience, and then you hit the chorus and it all goes a bit local radio breakfast show.  I understand that they’re trying to make him more commercial – he did sign to a major label, after all – but this record just seems schizophrenic to me.