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.
Pout all you want Drake, but you don't get everything your own way every time. The man with no quality control filter releases three albums at once, but still can't quite manage a chart clean sweep. Find out what he did manage inside.
This lady is not Michael Jackson. But she is one of the stars of the newly-minted video for a song that becomes a major chart hit for the very first time ever in this country. It is a bizarre world where the golden oldies are taking over. And the songs of 2026 are increasingly struggling to be heard.
Michael Jackson's 1983 face heralds a week in which he lands a surprise No.1 album on a technicality, invades the Top 3 for the first time since his death and almost - almost! - eclipses the big news of Rein Me In landing ten weeks at the top. Meaning Madonna and Sabrina are almost an afterthought.
Why is one broadcaster treated as toxic while a complicated pop legacy continues to print money? Between the "chart hokey-cokey" of the Top 40 and the technical wizardry of Michael Jackson’s streaming credits, we explore the strange paradoxes of this week's countdown. Plus: I told you so about Olivia Rodrigo. (Sorry, not sorry).
