Single File: w/c 5/6/05

Yeah, still there. And the one involving Wes and Daryl Denham, truly horsemen of the apocalypse, is out tomorrow. Snipers should be made legal for such occasions. Ladies and gentlemen, this could last for some time.

Here's a thing, though. How come, with the size they are and the wide audience their albums attract, singles by Oasis and Coldplay have now failed to hang on to anything like a good sales pattern after week one? Last week Lyla went 1-6, now Speed Of Sound goes 2-8, meaning Akon and Gorillaz climb places for no decent reason. The Foo Fighters' new Nickelback direction gets the highest new entry at 4, beating their previous best by a place, only really notable for the fact this was co-held by This Is A Call, their first single now from all of ten years ago. Whatever did happen to Pat Smear? The White Stripes are next on the new entry roll call at 9, although Blue Orchid is hardly destined for Magic FM's playlist.

James Blunt, who almost by post-Gray/Rice osmosis now spends a second week in the album top five, enters at 12 on the back of a Times piece that tried to paint him as a renegade because he's an ex-soldier who makes reference to Kosovo in an album track. Funeral For A Friend are still going apparently and they're at 15, while Ben Adams is at 18. Oh, you do. He was in A1, the boyband that started out as a less complex Big Fun and grew into a band that made a big thing out of playing their own instruments and writing their own songs, because just imagine how much bigger the Beatles could have been if they did that. Now he's become Justin Timberlake manque, and nobody cares.

But more care than Geri Halliwell's fanbase. Now, we're led to believe that Ride It failed to make the top five last time out because people didn't know who it was by, being credited just to Geri and having her face on the single cover. She's gone back to her full name for Desire and in it crashes at... 22. Her first single, out of nine, to miss the top ten, it's hardly her fault that it's out in the week
everyone's more concerned about her old band but it is her fault that her promotion seems to have been Look Everyone It's The Famous Geri Halliwell rather than the Rachel Stevens cast-off of the song and its disturbing video she's been inordinately proud to call her own idea. The UN might want to make a phone call tomorrow.

What else? The Noise Next Door's final single - not announced as such yet, of course, but you watch - limps in at 27, Embrace make an even duller record than usual at 28, Groove Coverage cover Alice Cooper's Poison to little effect at 32 and somehow Studio B creep back in at 40. Triple 8, the boy band you thought had split given they were less successful than V, who have, will surely do so anyway after their 42 entry, only two ahead of The Kills.