Quite an odd one this week, with the Sunday chart not bearing all that much resemblance to the midweeks for a change.  That’s partly because of a last-minute download campaign, partly because the midweek number one had frontloaded sales that couldn’t last the week, and partly because of some tracks gaining real momentum during the week, including the first ever K-pop record to make the UK chart.

But first…

1.  The Script (featuring will.i.am) – “Hall of Fame”

The run of new entries at number 1 comes to a halt.  Unlike everything around it, this single has sustained its sales – and so it climbs from number 2 last week, to become the Script’s first number one.  Their new album “#3” enters the album chart this week at number 2, which is very confusing.

For will.i.am, this is his third solo appearance at number one, following Usher’s “OMG” in 2010, and his own “This is Love” back in July.  He’s also had five number ones with the Black Eyed Peas.

2 – Amelia Lily – You Bring Me Joy

The midweek number one, but it’s tailing off fast – at time of writing, it’s number 7 on iTunes.

Amelia Lily Oliver is a teenager who came third in last year’s X Factor.  Her route to the final was a little odd.  The first live show last year didn’t have a public vote, but instead saw each judge make the final cut from their own category.  Amelia was booted out by Kelly Rowland, a decision which wasn’t especially well received by the live audience.  Later in the series, however, the producers needed to fill the drug-shaped hole left by the expulsion of ludicrous wannabe rock star Frankie Cocozza, and decided that the best way to do that – rather than risk the consequences of voiding a previous eviction vote – was to let the public vote for one of the show 1 acts to go back in.  Entirely predictably, Amelia won that vote by a landslide and made it to the final.

She has now been signed by Xenomania, a Sony subsidiary affiliated with the production team responsible for most of Girls Aloud’s bigger hits.  “You Bring Me Joy” is a bit of a grower, actually; at first glance it’s a bit too restrained, but it kind of gets to you after a few listens.

It was number 1 in the midweeks, but sales tailed off during the week – it’s already somewhere around number 5 on iTunes.

11.  Tulisa (featuring Tyga) – “Live It Up”

Tulisa’s second solo single is certainly a change of pace for her, but whether it’s actually any good is another matter.  Those klaxons really do get annoying after a while, and this feels a bit like a watered down version the sort of minimalism that didn’t really work when Nicola Roberts tried it.  Still, it’s trying.  Her debut single “Young” went to number 1 in May, and the consensus seems to be that a number 11 placing for the follow-up is rather disappointing – particularly as it has already embarked on a graceful swandive down the iTunes chart.

This is Tyga’s second appearance on the top 40, after the ridiculous “Rack City” scraped its way to number 39 back in the spring.  It was a pretty big hit in America, though, so I assume he’s here to try and help international sales.

12.  Gerry & The Pacemakers – “You’ll Never Walk Alone”

Gerry and the Pacemakers were contemporaries of the Beatles, with whom they shared a home town and a manager.  They were a pretty big deal between 1963 and 1965, though their impact in America was pretty minimal, and this record got nowhere for them in the States.  It’s a cover of a song from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical “Carousel”, which has been picked up as an anthem by fans of Liverpool FC.

It’s back in the chart as part of an awareness-raising campaign (or general display of anger, if you prefer) connected with the publication last week of the latest report into the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster, in which 96 people were crushed to death due to failures of police crowd control.  This resulted in the abolition of standing terraces in British football grounds.  The official enquiry blamed the police as far back as 1990, but what emerged this week was a further report establishing that the police had actively attempted to shift the blame, including the amendment of a vast number of witness statements to delete incriminating evidence.

In Liverpool in particular, the Hillsborough disaster is a very big deal indeed.  The official police line at the time – that the fans were to blame – was enthusiastically adopted by the Sun newspaper, and its sales in Liverpool have never recovered to this day.  At any rate, if you’re going to buy a record to express your anger at the Hillsborough disaster and the public response to it, this would be the record.  Which is why a Merseybeat cover of an old show tune is back in the chart.

The download campaign started very late in the week and has resulted in sales being split between two weeks’ charts.  At one point, it was number one on iTunes; it now stands at number 4.  Whether sales can be sustained long enough for it to climb next week must be doubtful.

14.  David Guetta (featuring Sia) – “She Wolf (Falling To Pieces)”
22.  David Guetta (featuring Ne-Yo and Akon) – “Play Hard”

These are the bonus tracks from the special edition of Guetta’s album “Nothing But The Beat”, which enters at 13 on this week’s album chart.  “Play Hard” in particular has really gathered momentum; it was at number 39 on the midweeks.  Both currently look set to climb next week, even though neither is actually being promoted as a proper single.

“She Wolf” reunites Guetta with Sia, who did the vocals for his number one “Titanium” earlier in the year.  It’s a rather awkward record that can’t make up its mind whether it’s a heartfelt ballad or a dancefloor anthem, and ends up swerving violently between the two.

“Play Hard” gives Ne-Yo three tracks on the chart, to go with his own current single “Let Me Love You”, and his guest appearance on the Conor Maynard single that we’ll come to later.  The hook is sampled from the pop-trance hit “Better Off Alone” by Alice Deejay (a collective pseudonym for a bunch of Dutch producers), which reached number 2 in 1999.  The original is better, because it just looped the hook for its whole running time without throwing Ne-Yo and Akon at it.

17.  Mumford and Sons – “I Will Wait”

A relatively rare outing on the singles chart for the folk revivalists, whose album “Sigh No More” was a worldwide hit in 2009 (and re-enters the album chart at 34 this week).  This is the lead single from the follow-up album “Babel”, and comfortably beats their previous chart peak of number 24 (for “Little Lion Man”).  Strangely, considering they’re an English band, this single was released in America a few weeks ago.

18.  The Killers – “Runaways”

This is the lead single from their fourth album “Battle Born”, and as you’d expect, it’s an 80s pop-rock epic.  The Killers haven’t had a full scale single out for three years.  Their biggest UK hit, perhaps surprisingly, was the 2006 single “When You Were Young”, which got to number 2.

24.  Otto Knows – “A Million Voices” 

Trance music from 2012!  And from the “write four bars and loop it with variations for six minutes” school of trance, too.  This is Otto Knows’ debut single; he’s a Swedish DJ and a protege of Avicii.  Not sure it quite lives up to the title “Million Voices”, but it’s pretty uplifting for all that.

29.  Kanye West (featuring Big Sean & Jay-Z) – “Clique”

This was nowhere to be seen in the midweeks.  It’s the fourth single – or advance track, I guess, because there’s no video or anything like that – from “Cruel Summer”, a collaboration between West and various acts signed to his label.  None of the earlier tracks made the UK chart, but then none of the earlier tracks had Jay-Z on them.

34.  Coldplay & Rihanna – “Princess of China”

Apparently, this is the spillover of Coldplay playing at the Paralympics closing ceremony.  Or something.

37.  PSY – “Gangnam Style”

If you haven’t seen this yet, then watch the video before you go further.  Honest.  We’ll wait.

This is the viral hit of the summer in the USA, and it started to take off in Britain during last week.  It’s continuing to climb the iTunes chart, and it looks like a pretty safe bet that it’s going to go a lot further.

But what the hell is it?

Well, let’s start with the obvious.  This is the first Korean record ever to make the UK singles chart.  It’s not typical K-pop – PSY is a rapper who writes his own material and directs his own videos, which alone would be enough to mark him out from the idol acts who populate the South Korean pop scene, even if he wasn’t an ordinary-looking bloke in his mid-thirties.  Of course, being so obviously out of place among the teen acts is part of his schtick.

Even so, this is not just some novelty act that the internet has plucked to stardom.  PSY has been around for ten years in South Korea, and he’s now on to his sixth album.  “Gangnam Style” was a huge hit in South Korea too, spending five weeks at number one.  He’s a proper K-pop act, albeit an unusual one.

There’s been speculation for a while that Korean or Japanese acts might start making headway in the west, and needless to say, some Korean acts have started making moves in that direction.  Girl group – well, football team, really – Girls Generation have made English-language versions of some of their tracks, for example.  The original Korean version of “Boys” is vastly superior to the English version, perhaps because the lyrics are only enhanced by unintelligibility, but neither would exactly be out of place in a western chart.  (The actual track starts about 1:15 into the video.)

Well, “Gangnam Style” is the exact opposite of that – a record so tailored for local consumption that it’s essentially incomprehensible to Western viewers even with the benefit of a translation.  Naturally, its initial appeal to westerners lies in large part in the video’s apparent randomness, alongside the fact that it’s a catchy little tune.  It’s attracted our attention largely because of its foreignness, which is not necessarily going to make it easy for other Korean acts to capitalise on the attention.

PSY, who is no doubt as surprised as anyone else by the attention, has the advantage of speaking fluent English – he went to college in the States – and has shown up in America to capitalise on the situation and promote the record.  Interestingly, his own explanations of the record for American audiences tend to be very superficial.  Maybe he knows it’d take too long to explain the song properly, or maybe he knows that it would spoil the meme.

At any rate, if you want a detailed explanation of what the song is actually about, there’s an excellent dissection of it here.  But in general terms…

Gangnam (loosely, “South Bank”) is a district in Seoul.  Comparing it to Beverly Hills (as he does in American interviews) is a bit of a gloss.  It’s the home of the South Korean elite, and an area built largely since the 1980s.  Essentially, to South Koreans, it’s the symbol of aspirational materialism and the nouveau riche.  Literally, the song consists of PSY declaring that he’s looking for a girl who works hard and plays hard, and explaining how he will impress her with his Gangnam style.  The joke of the video, which is fairly clear to Korean viewers, is that his Gangnam lifestyle consists of cheap and ludicrous imitations, such as his non-existent horse.  It’s roughly the Korean equivalent of a video where somebody claims to be a rich guy with a limousine, but it turns out that the limousine is bright pink and he’s sharing it with a hen party.

Of course, without knowing the cultural references associated with Gangnam, or the numerous Korean celebrities who make cameo appearances, the video is pretty much gibberish to westerners, which is how westerners appear to like it.  (And even many Koreans take a while to pick up on things like the fact that the girl he’s smitten by is wearing clothes that appear to mark her as a symbol for the national lottery.)

Lest you think PSY is a one-trick pony, by the way, here’s his 2006 single “We Are The One”, which was the official single of the South Korean World Cup team that year.  Lyrically, it’s a fairly standard plea for unity and courage, but it sounds nothing remotely like “Gangnam Style”, and the video – in which he is kidnapped by the North Koreans and replaced with a highly trained impostor – is another winner.  Who knows, maybe he actually can come up with a follow-up single that’ll take people by surprise.

38.  Conor Maynard (featuring Ne-Yo) – “Turn Around”

Finally, the other record with Ne-Yo.  It’s going to climb next week too, and it’s not nearly as interesting as the Korean thing.