Gennaro Castaldo Watch: Making more excuses for The Beatles

So, after all that effort, all that promotion, The Beatles trot in a fifth place, far behind Vera Lynn.

Vera Lynn. The kings of the 60s beaten to a sales pulp by someone from two decades before. I've heard the streets of Ditchling are ringing with the observation about revenge being a dish best served cold.

Meanwhile, with the sudden revelation that people couldn't really care that much about The Beatles, we're now in scrabbling-around-for-an-explanation phase. Gennaro Castaldo has been working on this already, of course:

HMV's Gennaro Castaldo said the fact the Beatles albums went on sale late in the week damaged their chances of a number one.

He said: "We've seen huge demand for the remastered Beatles albums since Wednesday, but sales have been spread across all the releases, especially the box sets.

"The fact they were only out for four days also seems to have counted against their prospects of a number one."

Oh, yes. The Beatles have a massive fan base who will only buy records on Mondays and who would not go near a record shop on any other day and, naturally, that means that wouldn't buy any of the records. Apart from all the box sets. They still went out to buy the box sets, apparently. Although the box sets didn't sell that many, either, so it doesn't look like even if they had been swapped for individual sales the records would have gone any higher. And there were some dudes in Peterborough who said for sure they were going to buy all the albums, but they were waiting for the cheques from this thing they did for a bloke down the pub to come in, and if you count those sales, and treat all the sales as two, because originally they were two-sided records, they win, right?