Weekender : quite allurring in a certain light

CHART OF DARKNESS: The Scissor Sisters become the first US band since Blondie to spend two weeks jointly atop both charts. Come on, you'd have wondered before long. Oddly the Killers and - who knew? - Fratellis stay put in second too. Lil Chris is your number three single, although we wonder how much of a potential career curve there is for him. How on earth are Evanescence number four? We assumed that when the songwriter left they'd go the way of all Rasmus, yet here they are with goth turned up to eleven and a big sleeper hit. Lily Allen at 6 - surely everyone interested downloaded it for free from her Myspace? The bitter becomes bitten - Pussycat Dolls are somehow at 7 with the fifth single from their album, High School Musical - oh, apparently sappy kids love it, not that anyone in the rest of the UK media has picked up on it - at 9, Razorlight downloaded to 15, Paolo Nutini 20. The Streets Featuring Pete Doherty reveals that fanbase well has run dry at 25, although he's beaten Dirty Pretty Things, who are at 34. OK Go's high maintenance viral marketing only gets them up to 36 having been 58 on downloads, although even that's doing well compared to Lionel Richie, who turned up at 52 on same last week - is that strictly the target audience for iTunes? - yet only makes it to 45 on physical sales. Must be the housebound. The Pipettes inevitably win the battle of the Chatters (see last week's In Shops Tomorrow) at 46, which means they've outdone Leann Rimes & Brian McFadden, two singers who people cared about a good five years ago, at 48. Juliette & The Licks, on an indie but promoted as if on Universal itself, makes it to 50, which means there's a lot more interest than we've ever sounded out. A word for Simply Red too, who miss the top 40 for the first time in 17 years. Nothing of real interest in the albums bar Larrikin Love at 37, which seems low for a band of their potential cult status. The Freedom Spark isn't a great title, no, but be fair on the lads.

FREE MUSIC: If you've been concentrating you know we love the dark indie-noir of Okkervil River, which is why we've been chomping at the bit to link to The President's Dead, Will Sheff and co's first new material since the extended Black Sheep Boy story. Actually, it's not a political song as such, an acoustic pop wondering as to how such an event would affect one person's thoughts.

HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Dananananaykroyd is a bloody stupid name for a band. We hope they appreciate our considered input. The Glaswegian double-drummer sextet, who inaugurated Moshi Moshi's new 7" Singles Club last month, call their throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-collapses melange of Fugazi, Jetplane Landing, Pavement, post-rock and Maximo Park on steroids 'fight pop'. We file it under noisily melodic goodness.

VISUAL REPRESENTATION: Mark E Smith is no fan of the Internet, not only in severing ties with The Fall's official site earlier this year but pulling Country On The Click when it leaked, remixing and re-recording parts and putting it out as The Real New Fall LP. While he's looking the other way, though, YouTube has become full of his works. In chronological order: playing at Peel's suggestion on The Tube, the quite mad Eat Y'self Fitter video, Leigh Bowery gets an office job for Cruiser's Creek, Bowery and Michael Clarke get him to talk on their Hail The New Puritan film before he scores the latter's I Am Kurious Oranj with Cab It Up, their sole Festive 50 number one Bill Is Dead is interpreted for Snub TV, and towards the modern day we find Mark E giving it some Tim Gudgin, Baddiel and Skinner reinterpreting How I Wrote Elastic Man (what an excellent person whoever put that up must be) and part of their audience-stunning Leeds Festival set from this year.

EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: I Love Music, commonly ILM, seems a fair enough forum but you wouldn't want to, like, spend lots of time in there. You know... just in case. They all know stuff, at least, which is how they've come to pull together a set of Rough Guides, beginner's tracklistings to a cornucopea of acts, styles, themes, places, feelings and all that.

IN OTHER NEWS: A question borne of curiosity - as we can't get into your board without registering, Mossley AFC Forum, can you let us know why you're giving STN so many hits today? It's not our obvious target market, to be honest...