Welcome to James Masterton's Chart Watch UK – your essential weekly deep dive into the Official UK Charts!
As the longest-running British music column online, we bring you the ultimate guide to this week's Top 40, unraveling the stories behind the biggest new singles and chart-topping hits. Plus, explore our extensive archives, a treasure trove of nearly 1800 articles documenting three and a half decades of popular music history and expert analysis.
Watch out all, there's a Storm on the way. A viral VMAs performance sends what may well be the most talked-of track of the autumn skywards. But the big story is another Swift Shift. A timely physical singles drop giving Taylor Swift a No.1 edge she would almost certainly otherwise have lacked.
Like a Nashville superhero, Taylor Swift does her thing of swooping in, very nearly landing her second chart grand slam in the space of a year, and then quite possibly takes off again. The special edition of Life Of A Showgirl does its thing and gives her a chart double for the fifth consecutive year.
This is not clickbait. Nicole Kidman does not have a hit single this week. But a song named after her is in the Top 5 which seems a good enough reason to put her here. Everything suddenly seems fresh and new, a long overdue chart shakeup is well under way.
All that jazz - and then some. Ezra Collective make their own small piece of history at the top of the albums chart this week. Meanwhile in the singles market it is a great week if you are a contemporary act with two hit tracks. Of which there are at least a couple.
