Midweeks come to Radio One

At the risk of sounding like some actor pretending to be a PC user, we did suggest a few years back that sharing the midweek charts properly might be a way to try and make the charts a bit more interesting for the average person.

At the risk of sounding like a contrary sod, now they're actually going to do it, I think it's probably come way, way too late to actually turn round interest in the best selling singles.

Oh, yes, there were a lot of people exercised about the battle between McElderly and Rage Against The Machine back at Christmas - when Sony turned against Sony - but of those people so exercised, how many could even tell you what's number one this week? Even Joe lost interest once Boxing Day came around. He doesn't even know his record eventually made it to number one. Nobody from his team has bothered to check.

There's a characteristically odd piece of writing from MediaGuardian to welcome plans for Radio One to broadcast the chart:

BBC Radio 1 is to break with more than 40 years of tradition by broadcasting a midweek chart rundown for the first time.

Eh? But for the first couple of decades, the midweek chart rundown was the chart - certainly until the mid 1980s, there wasn't really much opportunity for there to be a half-way chart because it was too slow and expensive to compile the chart proper without giving it a couple of days for numbers to be collected, collated and crunched. So, yes, it is something they haven't done before; and, yes, they could have been doing it for a few years now. But breaking a 40 year tradition? That's a bit over the top.

Gordon in the morning: Where is Beatles band?

Meanwhile, Gordon is all excited about the Beatles reissues:

BEATLEMANIA is back - blasting the Fab Four back into the Top Ten with a whopping 50,000 sales of their sparkling reissues in just one day.

Woo-hoo! We're with The Be... hang about...

How many sales?

a whopping 50,000 sales of their sparkling reissues

50,000? But weren't there 14 albums released? 50,000 records spread over 14 titles comes out at an average of... well, sales that would make Speech Debelle's pre-Mercury figures look like Elvis Presley.

All of that coverage, and they manage to only flog fifty thousand albums?

Helpfully, Gordon runs the midweek chart, complete with sales figures:

1 (-) Kings & Queens
Jamie T - 17,568

2 (2) We'll Meet Again
The Very Best Of Vera Lynn - 14,092

3 (1) Humbug
Arctic Monkeys - 10,495

4 (-) Ignore The Ignorant
The Cribs - 10,137

5 (3) One Love
David Guetta - 9,458

6 (4) Only By The Night
Kings Of Leon - 8,356

7 (-) Abbey Road
The Beatles - 7,164

8 (-) Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles - 7,002

9 (5) The End
Black Eyed Peas - 6,354

10 (8) Lungs
Florence & The Machine - 6,090

11 (6) Sunny Side Up
Paolo Nutini - 6,054

12 (-) Revolver
The Beatles - 6,048

13 (-) The Beatles (Stereo Box Set)
The Beatles - 5,867

14 (10) Songs For You Truths For Me
James Morrison - 5,798

15 (-) Rubber Soul
The Beatles - 5,239

Now, to be fair, The Beatles albums did only come into the shops on Tuesday, which means that everyone else had a whole extra twenty-four hours to tot up sales, but even so - given that this was meant to somehow prove that The Beatles were the greatest band ever by storming the charts - it has wound up with them looking a poor second to Vera Lynn.

Yes, they're old albums, and the sales figures aren't bad for back catalogue - but the sheer heft of press coverage suggested we were meant to be viewing this in those terms. As it is, their sales are around the level of a Kings Of Leon record nudging its first anniversary. That's about a quarter of a sale per column inch.

Elsewhere: The love of JLS exhibited by Gordon Smart's pages is bizarre, but understandable - quids pro quo and keeping Simon Cowell happy.

The obsession with slowly chipping away at N-Dubz, though, is bemusing. Following on from announcing that Dappy's juvenilia consisted of raps about stabbing and policemen, and stabbing policemen comes a story today, filed by Jess Rogers, which drags up a "secret" conviction:

RAP star DAPPY has a secret conviction for spitting in a girl's face during a drunken brawl.

It wasn't actually secret - the suggestion there was something hushed-up about it just seems to be a simple way of explaining how Gordon Smart's well-resourced reporting engine didn't happen to report the conviction when it happened.

Dappy - real name Costas Contostavlos - had kept the incident quiet.

Now, what he did was a nasty thing, and it's right to condemn it, but what does Rogers mean by "keeping it quiet"? It was in a public court, and he's been doing community service. Admittedly, he didn't issue a press release - but then that's understandable, isn't it?

And - to be fair to Gordon's team - back when this happened nobody would have been much interested. Equally, though, nobody's very interested in Dappy now, either, and yet Gordon seems determined to bring him down. All somewhat curious.

Pink shocks lightning

There is nothing, not even a smidge, of anything amusing about the Pink single being ahead of the new Oasis effort in the midweek charts. Nothing amusing at all.

Still, Noel will always find some friends don't let you down.

Hold Steady sell strongly

While various incarnations of Abba songs fight at the top end of the chart, The Hold Steady are at number eight in the midweeks.

Jay-Z appearance pays off - for Jay-Z

The Glastonbury appearance, then, has put some money in Jay-Z's back pocket, as the Midweeks are showing 99 Problems back in the Top 25, and Numb/Encore creeping into the top 40.

It's not expected that Oasis will be appearing in Sunday's chart.

Meanwhile, Andrew Collins has considered if Jay-Z fitted Glastonbury from a political, rather than musical, angle.

Minogue: Slow sales

The question about what, exactly, the judges on the X Factor know about the area in which they claim to be expert rises again: despite all the publicity of being on television every week, and a well-timed release-week "storm out", Dannii Minogue's Touch Me Like That is unlikely to sell much more than 1,500 copies. Perhaps she ought to be auditioning rather than judging.

Bad Headlines

The Spice Girls' comeback single is achieving the dubious distinction of shaming both them and Children In Need. Indeed, it's managed to pull of the feat of being the lowest-selling CIN single ever, which - considering its antecedents include Shane Richie doing I'm Your Man and Johnny Vaughan singing with Denise Van Outen - is quite a thing.

On the other hand, nobody really much wanted anything new from the Spices anyway, and the single sounds like an offcut from the disappointing third album.

Next year, get John Simm in to do something from the Spices back catalogue in character as the Master. Stop, perhaps.

Gennaro Castaldo watch: Monkeys overrun the singles chart

The wires ping again with more thoughts from HMV's spokesperson, Gennaro Castaldo. He's been thinking about the possibility that the availability of each track from the Arctic Monkeys new album as individual downloads on iTunes could mean something sort-of-historic is going to happen this weekend. Indeed, it's had Castaldo reaching for the golden musical yardstick. The Beatles:

HMV spokesman Gennaro Castaldo said: "The Arctic Monkeys are currently on course to have a total of 18 songs in the top 200 when the next Official UK Charts are announced on Sunday.

"You'd probably have to go back to the heyday of the Beatles in the early-mid Sixties to find anything that could come close to matching this record.

"On the chart albums front, sales of Favourite Worst Nightmare continue to power ahead.

"The album looks set to go through the 250,000 mark by the end of the week - making it the fastest selling album since the Arctic Monkeys' Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not.

"This not only underlines the growing iconic status of the Arctic Monkeys as the UK's leading rock act, but visibly demonstrates how the recent changes to the rules governing chart eligibility have impacted on the make-up of the charts."

It also, if you think about it, shows how far physical record shops like HMV have drifted from being at the forefront of music sales, but presumably that's a thought that would keep Gennaro awake at night.

What's much more interesting is the relative positions of each track:

Brianstorm (midweek - top 5)
Fluorescent Adolescent (top 50)
505 (top 60)
Teddy Picker (top 70)
Balaclava (top 70)
D Is For Dangerous (top 70)
Old Yellow Bricks (top 70)
This House Is A Circus (top 75)
Do Me A Favour (top 75)
Only Ones Who Know (top 75)
The Bad Thing (top 80)
If You Were There, Beware (top 120)

Brianstorm is, of course, a single and so we can probably discount the lead that has over the other tracks, but the distance between Fluorescent Adolescent and If You Were There, Beware is quite wide. It's probably slightly queasy viewing for record company executives pondering the future of their industry, as even a band who inspires such slavish devotion would have difficulty shifting all the tracks on album if offered on their own merits rather than as part of a package.