Single File : w/c 10/7

It was set up for Mariah Carey, really, especially when it was reported she was top by a good thousand copies by Thursday having been behind in the proper official midweeks, the fact she was at Live 8 seemingly outweighing the reaction to her there with UK TV publicity still to be screened. So what happens? Back come 2Pac and Elton, who's stuck Indian Sunset on the B-side of his new single out this week, to pip her pretty much at the line. Like Elton's, Mariah's chart record isn't as great as you'd think, her two number ones in fifteen years and 30 charting singles being a cover and a collaboration with Westlife. I say collaboration, more hypnosis-induced sleepwalk.

Can we stop this now, then? Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone, which debuts at 5, does not sound just like Interpol, or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or any other cool peg every other blog and online music magazine is trying to hook it onto. It sounds like an even shrieker Avril Lavigne backed by bored session musicians who wish they were the Strokes. The day we stop getting the shock of our lives that a pop record contains guitar will be the day we can all get a grip on ourselves. Note that Clarkson's still the only American Idol contestant to have been picked up in this country. Kanye West at 8 makes it three top ten singles out of four, although I'm not sure about the consistency in someone involved with Damon Dash and Roc-A-Fella Records releasing a record about the extortion in diamond mining. Rachel Stevens enters at 10, for which see posts passim. Joss Stone is surely helped up the chart by Live 8 to 20 - it's the fourth single from her album and only the first went top 20 otherwise - while lack of anyone being really arsed sees Fat Joe at 34, Brooke Valentine 35 and Daft Punk at 40, all outdoing Beck who's at 45. Live 8 chiefly explains three re-entries (Snoop Dogg, U2 and chiefly Razorlight's Somewhere Else climbing 31 to 30) and four climbers. That is to say, explains them except Amarillo climbing four to 23 after 17 chart weeks with no obvious repromotion, and in fact just the opposite with the notably non-charity benefitting Avenues And Alleyways hitting the music TV channels.

A quick shufty at the album charts while we're here, not so much at Pink Floyd's best of Echoes re-entering at 19 or Razorlight's third sudden chart spike following post-Parkinson and post-Somewhere Else reissues but that after a week including Live 8, big stadium gigs and an appearance on ITV's G8 discussion panel Coldplay's X&Y actually leaves the top spot to make way for the marshmallow juggernaut of James Blunt's Back To Bedlam, which wasn't given free advertising this week so must have suddenly shifted a hell of a lot of copies. Look upon his works, Damien Rice, and despair.