Last week, Lady Gaga released a single on Friday afternoon, it entered at number 3 on the strength of a day and a half’s sales, and I confidently predicted that it would climb to the top in its first full week of release.  Well, so much for that idea.

As it turns out, what seems to have happened is that the hardcore Lady Gaga fans – of whom there are apparently quite a lot – ran out and bought the single in the first few days, but it’s taking longer to catch on with a wider audience.  This shouldn’t actually have come as a surprise, since she has a track record of releasing singles that took a while to catch on before climbing to the top.  Perhaps “Born This Way” will be the same.  (I wasn’t sold on it at first, but it’s certainly growing on me.)

Regardless, the upshot is that although she was number one in the Wednesday midweek chart, Lady Gaga didn’t sustain her sales over the course of a second week, and Jessie J’s “Price Tag” outsold her again.  At time of writing, “Born This Way” has dropped to 9 on the iTunes chart, while “Price Tag” continues to sell.

But neither of those singles is this week’s number one.  Unexpectedly, this is.

That’s “Someone Like You” by Adele.  Rather good, isn’t it?

And it’s at number 1 because of the Brit Awards, Britain’s traditionally shambolic and often half-baked answer to the Grammies.  The Brit Awards didn’t actually do that well in the ratings this year – foreign readers may find this difficult to believe, but it was actually beaten by a documentary about gypsies on Channel 4.  (I say “documentary”.  “Reality show with pretensions” would be nearer the mark.)  Nonetheless, as X Factor annually proves, if you put live music on primetime ITV, several million viewers will watch it, will hear records that they didn’t know about, and will go out and buy them.

This year, all of the live performances were made available on iTunes as midweek single releases, and as such they’re eligible for the charts.  Complicating matters further, the singles chart is actually now set up as a song chart – so you can release as many versions of a song as you like, and the chart compilers will lump them all together.

Plainly, the stand-out performance of the show was Adele’s version of “Someone Like You”, a track which was already slated to be the second single from her album “21”.  In fact, the song already charted as an album track download three weeks ago.  Most of the sales of “Someone Like You” last week were of the Brits live version, but it inherits the chart placing of the studio version.  The result is that the song has moved 36-33-47-1, giving it the second-biggest jump to number 1 in history.  (The record is held, on a technicality, by Pixie Lott’s “Boys and Girls”, where a few copies jumped the gun and went on sale at the end of the previous week, resulting in a 73-1 jump.)

Adele Adkins was supposed to be the great breakthrough star of 2008, but after a successful debut single, things kind of tailed off.  Luckily for her, last year’s X Factor made heavy use of her cover of “Make You Feel My Love”, which got her back into the charts and teed things up nicely for the release of second album “21”.  She’s made number 2 twice – with debut “Chasing Pavements” and the excellent “Rolling in the Deep”, currently at 4 – but this is her first number 1.

That gives her two singles in the top 5, and renewed sales of her debut album “19” mean that she also has two albums in the top 5.  The chart compilers do like to find obscure and rather pointless “records” to announce, and so they’ve taken the opportunity to inform us that Adele is only the third act in history to manage two top 5 single and two top 5 albums simultaneously – the others being the Beatles and John Lennon.  And Lennon doesn’t really count, because it was immediately after his death.

Further down the chart, it’s a relatively quiet week for new entries.  Since “Someone Like You” is technically a re-entry, the highest new entry is at 14: “Rocketeer” by the Far East Movement featuring Ryan Tedder.   (Tedder is the songwriter for Onerepublic, if you’re trying to place the name.)  This is the follow-up to “Like A G6”, which is probably the main reason why it got this far.  It’s not especially memorable, and the midweeks have it dropping out of the top 20.

Number 21 is “Rescue Me” by You Me At Six and Chiddy (one half of Chiddy Bang, who had a hit with “Kids” last year).  You Me At Six are a rock band from Surrey who’ve been around for several years without really making a breakthrough – until now, their only top 40 hit was “Finders Keepers”, which got to 33 in summer 2009.  “Rescue Me” is a rather formulaic rock ballad, but the  curiously incongruous guest rap does add something to it.

Otherwise, this week’s new entries are all Brit Awards and Glee Cast numbers.  Number 31 is “Kidz” by Take That, an upcoming single charting on the strength of a Brits performance.  This is going to climb further.  It’s certainly a departure from the band’s usual style, and sounds like the result of some bizarre body-swap comedy involving them and Muse.  The song would have seemed more at home on a Robbie Williams album, and it can’t be a coincidence that Take That have stated making this sort of thing now that he’s returned to the fold.  I think it’s rather good, though it has to be said that Take That don’t really do “threatening”.

Also on the Brit Awards, Tinie Tempah did a medley of “Pass Out”, “Miami 2 Ibiza” and “Written In The Stars”.  Since the chart compilers can’t match that to either of the previous singles, the effect is to split the sales.  “Pass Out” re-enters at 32, “Written in the Stars” at 33, and the medley “We Bring The Stars Out” lands at 40.  And the Glee Cast are back, with “Teenage Dream” at 36 (that’s the Katy Perry song, not the T-Rex one), and “Start Me Up/Livin’ on a Prayer” at 39.

Climbers this week: Rihanna’s “S&M” is up to 6.  “Eyes Wide Shut” by JLS climbs to 8 since they’ve finally got around to releasing the version with Tinie Tempah on it.  (His featured artist credit on that, his three Brits-related tracks, and current single “Wonderman” give him a remarkable five singles on this week’s chart.)  And “F–k You” by Cee Lo Green, also performed at the Brits, rebounds to 19.