Founded on the principle that there simply must be a gap in the market for another boy band, the Wanted were created by the same person who assembled the Saturdays.  Heavily marketed to the core boy band demographic, they’ve got the sort of fanbase that rushes out to buy things in the first week if you hype it enough in advance.  “Glad You Came” was hyped well in advance of its release, which is why it’s the new number one.

This is their second number one (following debut “All Time Low” last August).  Oddly, it’s actually the second single from their upcoming album; the lead track, “Gold Forever”, only reached 3.

The issue with the Wanted has always been whether they can expand their audience beyond the teenage girls.  In fairness, their singles generally hang around the charts long enough to suggest that they do find a wider audience.  And the midweeks have this track spending a second week at number one, admittedly in the absence of any serious competition.

It’s not a great song by any means, but it does have one of those weirdly catchy bits that you get on Romanian dance records or low-end Spanish discos.  The video certainly seems to fancy itself as a holiday hit.

The Wanted aside, there’s not a great deal going on.  A few minor climbers but nothing of any real significance, and three new entries much further down the chart.  Number 16 is “Little Bad Girl” by David Guetta featuring Taio Cruz & Ludacris; it’s pretty much what you’re probably imagining, which is to say that at least it’s got a good hook.  The video has some unusually blatant product placement, but frankly it isn’t worth sitting through just to see that.

Number 17 is “Love How It Hurts” by Scouting For Girls, which is the bonus track from the re-issue of their last album, and sounds pretty much like all their other singles.  Fine if you like that sort of thing, and at least they’ve got a niche.

And number 37 is “Champagne Showers” by LMFAO featuring Natalia Kills… which has been steadily climbing from the lower reaches for a while, and turns out to be more interesting than I’d thought.

(The track starts about two minutes in.)

It’s not LMFAO that interest me here – it’s Natalia Kills, who has actually charted before, in a guise she’d probably rather forget.

Natalia Cappuccini started off as an English child actress.  For a while she played Amy Franks in The Archers, a long-running Radio 4 soap opera about farmers.  That’s not a promising start for a career in pop music.  Nonetheless, in 2005, at the age of 19, she launched a rapping career under the name “Verbalicious”, and released a single called “Don’t Play Nice”.  It got to number 11.

The song’s alright, in a PJ & Duncan sort of way.  But it clearly has pretensions of credibility.  Pretensions which the video cut off at the knee by positioning her unequivocally as a kiddie act.  In terms of its sheer career-killing potential, this may be one of the worst videos ever made.

Shortly after, the record label went bust, and that was the end of that.  She hasn’t charted in the UK again until this week.  Apparently, she somehow got herself signed by Interscope in 2008, relocated to mainland Europe, and released a single called “Mirrors” under the name “Natalia Kills” at the end of last year, to modest central-European success, along with an album that appears to have made little impact.

Strangely, the LMFAO single seems to be the first attempt to promote her in her home territory – perhaps because the only way to rebuild her credibility is through the medium of the guest appearance.  The midweeks have this going further, so perhaps she’ll make it work.