Tones And I's Dance Monkey tops the singles chart for a third week. Elbow make it a hat-trick of number one albums.

Tones And I remains at the top of the singles chart. Elbow get their third successive number one album.

Tones And I gets a third week at number one with her Dance Monkey. As stated here two weeks ago, she is the first female Australian teenage artist to top the chart since Kylie Minoge over thirty years ago. Minogue topped the chart for five weeks with I Should Be So Lucky so Tones And I has another two weeks to go to match that record.

Regard climbs back up to number two with Ride It. Post Malone’s Circles climbs one place to a new peak of number four. Last week’s high new entry from Travis Scott, Highest In The Room, falls to number five.

Of all the former members of One Direction, Harry Styles has been the quietest in chart terms although he continues to bag the lion’s share of publicity. This week he gets only his second top forty hit with Lights Up at number three. It is rather different in style from his number one single Sign Of The Times over two years ago, but is still refreshingly different from his erstwhile bandmates’ efforts.

Ed Sheeran could be heading for yet another number one. He, along with Cardi B and Camila Cabello, climbs seventeen places to number seven with South Of The Border. He faces competition from Lewis Capaldi whose Bruises climbs into the top ten at number nine.

The next new entry wins two contrasting weekly awards. The song 47 by Sidhu Moose Wala, MIST and Steel Banglez featuring Steflon Don has both the shortest title and the longest artist credit. Fellow fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy will be disappointed that the song wasn’t called 42 as that would have given me a reason to pay tribute to Stephen Moore who provided the voice of Marvin The Paranoid Android in the radio and television versions and who died two weeks ago. He had a very minor hit as Marvin in 1981. His brother, Mark Moore, was a member of S’Express.

Back to the current chart, Sidhu Moose Wala is a Punjabi singer who now lives in Canada. The title of the song is unlikely to be a reference to the UK chart position obtained by MIST’s debut hit, Fisherman in 2017 where he was featured artist alongside J Hus. MIST had a number seven hit earlier this year with So High. By a weird coincidence, both Steel Banglez and Steflon Don also have a current chart peak of number seven - with Fashion Week and Hurtin’ Me respectively.

Still with number seven hits, Maroon 5 have had two of them, Girls Like You last year and Sugar in 2015. They have a new entry this week with Memories at number nineteen, taking their tally of top forty hits to 22.

Several big hits of the year crash down the chart after seeing the value of their streams halved. Kygo and Whitney Houston crash seventeen places to number 23 with Higher Love. AJ Tarcy’s dire Ladbroke Grove slumps 22 places to number 26 while the even worse Ransom by Lil Tecca plummets 26 places to number forty and the atrocious Strike A Pose by various people is down 28 places to number 38. Dominic Fike’s 3 Nights falls 23 places to number 32 and Joel Corry’s Sorry is at number 255, a drop of eighteen places.

The (admittedly irrelevant) battle for the longest credit among the new entries was a fairly competitive one this week. In most weeks Meduza, Becky Hill and Goodboys would have stood a good chance of taking it but Sidhu Moose Wala and co. had other ideas. Meduza reached number two earlier this year with Piece Of Your Heart (again with input from Goodboys). Becky Hill continues to be the most successful singer to emerge from any series of the UK version of The Voice.

After many years of releasing critically-acclaimed albums, Elbow finally achieved a number one with their sixth album The Take Off And Landing Of Everything in 2014. The follow-up, Little Fictions (2017), also topped the chart and now they make it a hat-trick with Giants Of All Sizes. That they have achieved this without packing their more recent albums with clones of One Day Like This makes their belated success all the more pleasing. One Day Like This is a fantastic song, but simply writing slightly different versions of the same song would have been supremely lazy.

Elbow have been regular performers at the Glastonbury Festival which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary next year. Could 2020 be the year Guy Garvey and co. finally get one of the headline slots?

Ed Sheeran’s No 6 Collaborations Project climbs back up to number two while the other major release of the year by a redhead, Lewis Capaldi’s Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent is at number three. Post Malone remains at number four with Hollywood’s Bleeding and D-Block Europe climbs one place to number five with PTSD.

With Queen compilations still selling well following the release of the Bohemian Rhapsody film last year, the temptation to release a new Freddie Mercury compilation has finally proved too tempting for the record company. To be fair to them, it does serve to remind people that Mercury had six top ten solo hits as well as the 26 with Queen. Never Boring is a new entry at number eighteen.

If it wasn’t for a song almost called 42, I could have used the chart debut of an album called Metal Galaxy as an excuse to shoehorn in a mention of Stephen Moore. The album, which lands at number nineteen, comes from Babymetal who Wikipedia describe as a Japanese kawaii metal band.

In the latter part of the 1970s many chart fans were getting rather tired of songs from Grease and Saturday Night Fever, as well as other songs trying to cash in on the success of the films, clogging up the charts. Some of the bands who had emerged in the punk years were still achieving success, but there was still an appetite for something different.

One of the people to deliver that something different was a man born Gary Webb, performing first under the name Tubeway Army and then as Gary Numan. He pulled off a surprise by topping the chart with his debut single Are ‘Friends’ Electric? before repeating the trick with Cars. His only album as Tubeway Army, Replicas, also went to number one as did his first solo album, The Pleasure Principle, just a few months later. The next album, Telekon , was another chart-topper but he has not reached the chart summit since then.

Now, new fortieth anniversary editions of Replicas and The Pleasure Principle have been released. Unlike other anniversary releases, though, these editions are made up of early versions of the tracks which eventually appeared on the two albums. Replicas is at number 31 with The Pleasure Principle at number 36.

I am contractually obliged to mention here that Gary Numan is actually thirteen days older than Gary Oldman.

There have been two good pieces of news this month for PJ Harvey fans patiently awaiting some new material. First, a new album is released today. Any fan disappointed with the album’s distinct lack of Polly Harvey’s vocals can console themselves with the second piece of good news. Some of the tracks on Big Thief’s album Two Hands, released last week, could very easily be PJ Harvey songs. The New York band’s first two albums failed to trouble the UK chart compilers but the next one, U.F.O.F., just missed out on a place in the top forty earlier this year. Just five months on they have released their fourth album and Two Hands gives them a chart breakthrough at number 34.

Big Thief’s fellow New Yorker, rapper Lil Tjay is at number 22 with True 2 Myself.

It has been Mark Ronson week on the BBC with a new documentary and a repeat showing of the programme on Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black album which he produced. That was followed by an appearance as co-presenter on the first programme if the new series of Later last night. His Late Night Feelings album re-enters at number 25.

Ariana Grande’s Thank U Next returns at number 35. Two albums which rarely leave the chart for long are also back. Ed Sheeran’s × is at number 37 and Abba Gold is at 40. Becky Hill’s Get To Know gets a new peak as a re-entry at number 24.