It’s the week before the Christmas chart, and so effectively the last regular chart of the year – though by this time the regular music industry has already gone into its festive shutdown.  The result is, with one unusual exception, a week of comparatively niche releases that did well at the start of the week and tailed off badly, and the usual upward march of the Christmas classics.

39.  Ed Sheeran – “Sing”
37.  Ella Henderson – “Ghost”

A couple of long running records, both number 1s in June, re-entering at the bottom end due to lack of competition from new releases.  “Sing” joins “Thinking Out Loud” and “Don’t” to give Sheeran three songs in this week’s chart.  Henderson’s current single “Yours” drops to 20 this week.

35.  Wizzard – “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday”

Another hardy perennial, this has been making regular re-entries since 2007.  The other Christmas back catalogue chart entires this year are “Last Christmas” at 36, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” at 16, and “Fairytale of New York” at 11 – its highest position since 2006, albeit marginally.

34.  Union J – “You Got It All”

I don’t normally mention fallers, but this one is pretty spectacular.  Union J were number 1 in last week’s midweeks before winding up at 2 on Saturday.  They now fall 32 places in their second week out.  Yes, all boy bands have front loaded first week sales, but even the likes of McFly never saw a top 5 new entry tail off quite this fast.  Union J seem to be an act with literally almost no appeal outside their fan base.  Which is understandable when the record is this bad.

22.  Hozier – “Take Me To Church”

Worth noting also that this one isn’t going away – it’s been floating around the bottom end of the chart for 13 weeks now, and reaches a new peak today.

21.  Fifth Harmony – “Bo$$”

Number 10 in the midweeks, so this must have fallen off a cliff.  American girl band Fifth Harmony’s debut UK hit is undeniably weird, starting with a perfectly decent brass hook, setting up the ever popular “independent women” theme, and then… repeatedly namechecking Michelle Obama.  “Michelle Obama / Purse so heavy / Getting Oprah dollars”.

So, somebody writing this song apparently thinks Michelle Obama is emblematic of (a) bling, and (b) independent women.  I don’t recall her being particularly bling-laden, and you’d have thought there were better examples of independence than the First Lady, who is, after all, ultimately stuck within the framework of being a professional spouse.  At any rate, it’s certainly not a reference point that travels internationally, which might explain why this lands up missing the top 20.

It’s tempting to wonder if this is some sort of dazzling piece of self-aware absurdism, but that seems unlikely, because Fifth Harmony are a Simon Cowell project.  They were the girl group formed from random auditions in the second season of the US X Factor.  I kind of like the sheer randomness of this track, and the hook is genuinely pretty good, but it’s a weird, weird record, certainly once it crosses the Atlantic.

17.  Bring Me The Horizon – “Drown”

This was at 6 in the midweeks, so again, sales clearly didn’t hold up.

“What doesn’t kill you / Makes you wish you were dead / I’ve got a hole in my soul growing deeper and deeper…” – you couldn’t call them subtle, could you?  Bring Me The Horizon used to be a metal core band but they’re apparently going commercial, and are duly rewarded with their first hit single – a surprisingly high one even in their current form, though they have had hit albums before.

According to Wikipedia, this song “shows a departure from the band’s past heavier sound”, as there is “absolutely no screaming or profanity in the entire song”.

7.  One Direction – “Night Changes”

Climbing 12 as the single promotion continues, making it this week’s highest climber.  Again, the contrast with Union J is pretty stark.  One Direction records, whatever else you say about them, actually gain momentum the more you play them to a wider public.

5.  Oliver Heldens featuring KStewart – “Last All Night (Koala)”

The follow up to “Gecko (Overdrive)”, which had a week at number 1 in July.  As usual, the UK record label has whacked a vocal onto it; the European original was an instrumental, though it wasn’t actually a hit anywhere in that form.  It has a completely different martial arts themed video that doesn’t really work.

Singer KStewart makes her debut chart appearance.  She sings for a group called Bondax, who haven’t had any hits, and she released a rather good lounge-ish solo single called “Tell Me ‘Bout That” earlier this year.

3.  Band Aid 30 – “Do They Know It’s Christmas? (2014)”

Rebounding because of the release of the CD single, which you can buy in places like Starbucks.  That’s not enough to get it to number 1, or even 2, so we can be pretty sure that Band Aid are out of contention for next week’s Christmas number 1.

This version of Band Aid has been reasonably successful and has obviously raised useful money – but it hasn’t been the mass event of earlier versions, and there have been a lot more murmurings this time about the song being a bit patronising to Africans.  Bob Geldof’s annoyance at this sort of reaction is understandable enough on the level of it distracting from the fundraising exercise (and given that he’s been essentially retired for years, it’s hard to see this as anything other than wholly sincere on his part).

That being said, it really isn’t the best song that could have been chosen for the ebola outbreak.  It was written with famine on the other side of the continent in mind; and of the five African countries where ebola has claimed lives, only Liberia is actually Christian, so if they are indeed unaware that it’s Christmas, this may well because they’re mostly Muslims.

1.  Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars – “Uptown Funk”

This wasn’t scheduled to come out until January, but it’s been rush-released after a cover on X Factor by Fleur East unexpectedly resulted in the X Factor download racing to the top of the iTunes chart.  It’s a rare case of X Factor doing an unreleased song, and you have to approach these stories with a certain degree of scepticism, but like I say, this is not a week where most major labels deliberately release singles; they expect to lose their momentum while the radio stations are doing Christmas songs and end of year reviews.

Fleur East wound up coming second in Sunday’s final, which is probably good news all round, because it means she’ll get signed anyway and promoted as a proper artist.  As for winner Ben Haenow, we’ll be seeing him next week, because Simon Cowell has decided that it’s safe to try for the Christmas Number 1 again.  He’s obviously the favourite, but then again, this year’s X Factor has had the lowest audience figures since season 1 – so it’s not inconceivable that it might fail to sustain its sales over a week.  I wouldn’t bet on it, though.  We haven’t had a regular release – by which I mean a non-novelty, non-X Factor, non-campaign, non-charity single – as the Christmas number 1 since “Mad World” back in 2003.  The Official Charts Company is claiming today that the race is “incredibly close”, but this is slightly disingenuous, because the chart week starts on Sunday, so Ronson has an advantage of most of a day over Haenow, and Haenow’s CD single doesn’t hit stores until Wednesday.  Normally physical sales are trivial these days, but records like this, stocked in supermarkets as impulse buys, are an exception.

It’s Bruno Mars’ fifth number one, coming three years and eight singles after the last one – though he has had two number 2 hits during that time.  His previous number ones were “Nothing on You” (2010, with B.o.B.), “Just the Way You Are” (2010), “Grenade” (2011), and “The Lazy Song” (2011).

Mark Ronson gets his first number one, though he reached number 2 twice in 2007 – with Daniel Merriweather on “Stop Me”, and Amy Winehouse on “Valerie”.  I find “Uptown Funk” a bit over-polished to really hit the mark, but it’s indisputably a genuine hit.

On the album chart:

• “X” by Ed Sheeran returns to number 1 again, so a lot of people are getting an album they already own for Christmas.
• “You Got It All” by Union J limps in at 28.
• “2014 Forest Hills Drive” by J. Cole enters at 33.  That’s a bit of a disappointment, after his last album “Born Sinner” made the top 10.  Single: “Apparently”.