This week's Official UK Singles Chart

1 ROLLIN' (Limp Bizkit) 

By my reckoning the last time we had a totally and utterly jaw-dropping eye-popping completely out of the blue Number One single like this was around two years ago when Offspring shot to the top with Pretty Fly (For A White Guy). Sure, Limp Bizkit had a Top 10 hit last summer with Take A Look Around but that had the MI:2 connection to help it on its way. The followup My Generation only made Number 15 and it looked as if Fred Durst's outfit were simply going to slip back to the mid-table obscurity as enjoyed by contemporaries such as Korn and Slipknot. Not so. This week we see the hardest, noisiest metal track for ten years outsell every other single this week to top the UK charts. Some will simply dismiss it as noisy crap, others will proclaim the end of musical civilisation as we know it. For my part I'm just delighted to reflect that the first few weeks of this year have seen European dance, smooth Latino pop and now some raucous in yer face nu-metal all claiming a spell at the top of the charts. Who said music was ever dull? Incidentally Rollin' recently replaced Kid Rock's American Badass as the entrance music used by WWF star The Undertaker which means the track can rank as the first ever piece of wrestling entrance music to top the charts. Now where did I put that air guitar?

6 THINGS I'VE SEEN (Spooks) 

You may not know who Spooks are. For the record they are Bookaso, Aqua Dinero, Hypno, Vengeance and Ming-Xia. Bet you are glad you asked now. Their stated aim is to be the future of hip-hop and on the basis of this single they may well be as their debut UK hit is a not totally unpleasant four minutes of a spaced out groove overlaid with the sweet vocals of singer Ming-Xia. The track is taken from both their forthcoming album S.I.O.S.O.S and the soundtrack of the Laurence Fishburne film Once In The Life. Somehow you imagine that if the Fugees were still operating as a unit, this is the record that they would be making.

7 ALL HOOKED UP (All Saints) 

So, farewell then All Saints. Or is it? Despite all the reports of rows over spangly jackets [this genuinely was the thing which caused them to split up] that have led to the girls unable to stand being in the same room as each other and tales of UK and European tours in doubt it would be wrong to write off the career of All Saints until it is finally made official. Nonetheless it is looking increasingly likely that this single could mark the final release by the foursome in their present form. If this is the end then they can look back on a pretty spectacular career, a run of chart hits that began in September 1997 and saw them clock up a 100% record of Top 10 hits including no less than five Number Ones and one (Never Ever) that broke the magical barrier to sell over one million copies. The third single from the Saints And Sinners album sees K-Gee back at the mixing desk but oddly enough this is far from being one of their better singles. Chart-wise it doesn't perform too spectacularly either, only matching the Number 7 peak from December 1999 of War Of Nerves to rank as their joint smallest hit ever. This might be the end of All Saints but certainly not the last we will see of the girls themselves. If nothing else Shaznay Lewis has the brightest future in front of her as a solo star, even if the others just content themselves to a life on the celebrity circuit making babies with pop star boyfriends.

9 YOU MAKE ME SICK (Pink) 

Pink's first hit came in June last year with There You Go, a song about how crap her boyfriend was. Then came Most Girls, a Top 5 hit in September last year which was about how crap men are. Now she clocks up a third Top 10 hit which is all about, er how crap her boyfriend is. You don't get the feeling she is becoming something of a one-trick pony do you? Anyway there is nothing wrong with the single itself which fizzes away quite nicely over her emotive and snappy vocal style but you cannot help but feel that the anger was far more effective the first time around.

11 FALLING (Boom) 

Peepeepeepeep. Manufactured pop alert. Boom are the latest set of bright young hopefuls keen for a shot at stardom. This time there are six of them, a mixture of male and female whose names we will probably end up being familiar with some time towards the end of the summer. To be fair to them they have taken the credible approach and their debut single could almost be described as Craig David-lite, a tuneful little ditty that is only held back by sounding like something the Truesteppers might knock off in their lunch hour for use as a b-side. OK you can be too harsh, Boom aren't offensively bad but of course that doesn't mean they are worthy of a big hit single either.

14 SPACED INVADER (Hatiras featuring Slarta John) 

Just to prove that it doesn't really matter where dance music comes from, George Hatiras hails from Canada. a land best known for Brian Adams, Shania Twain and the Barenaked Ladies rather than its contribution to the worlds' dancefloors. In actual fact this guy's works is more familiar than you might think, amongst his many credits is the remixing of Kylie Minogue's Please Stay into the version that became a Top 10 hit before Christmas. Featured rapper on his debut Top 20 hit is Slarta John whose voice you may recognise from Basement Jaxx' Jump N' Shout which was a Top 20 hit in November 1999.

16 THE FIELDS OF LOVE (ATB featuring York) 

A veritable trance supergroup this one, the talents of Andre 'ATB' Tanneberger and Torsten 'York' Stenzel plus assorted others combine to produce a Top 20 hit single. In actual fact the effect here isn't half bad as both acts take their propensity for using electric guitar lines in trance records to the absolute limit and so this is not so much a European trance hit as a mid-tempo blues record that you can dance to as well. Listen out for it soon in a wine bar near you.

21 DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT (Toploader) 

Toploader earn themselves a mention this week thanks to the continuing tenacious performance of their cover of Dancing In The Moonlight. The remixed track was released at the end of November last year, peaked at Number 11 and then began slipping down the chart as the holiday season approached. In Christmas week however the single rebounded to Number 20 and has maintained a similar chart placing ever since, this week celebrating a third successive week locked at Number 21 in its 10th week on release. Part of the credit for the continuing chart life of the track can be traced to TV as it has featured prominently in a commercial for supermarket chain Sainsbury's who you suspect licensed the track based on its original chart run back in March last year.

24 ONE STEP CLOSER (Linkin Park) 

US nu-metallers Linkin Park have featured prominently in their own section here on dotmusic all week and are now rewarded with their first ever UK hit single. Of course noisy guitar music is all a matter of taste so don't take my lack of enthusiasm about this track as an indication that it is bad, although you would be hard-pressed to find the same kind of magic spark in One Step Closer that you can in Rollin'. Hence the 23 place gap between them on the charts I guess.

28 D'YA WANNA GO FASTER (Terrorvision) 

Music can be a funny old business at times. Bradford rockers Terrorvision had been around since the start of the 1990s, hitting a commercial peak in the middle of the decade. In 1999 they experienced the most bizarre resurgence of their career when Mint Royale remixed an album track Tequila into a wild party record that hit Number 2 to give them the biggest hit of their career. The similarly styled follow-up III Wishes missed the Top 40 on the same day that Bradford City were elevated to the premiership and as if in sympathy EMI records dropped the band a few weeks later. Now they are back with a new attitude and a new label (strangely enough Papillon records which also picked up Cliff Richard's Millennium Prayer when er, EMI refused to release it). D'Ya Wanna Go Faster isn't good simply because it is Terrorvision (who after all have never been less than inspired) but because they now sound like Pop Will Eat Itself reborn. When traditional rock bands attempt to add danceable elements into their sound the effect can often be disastrous (see: Def Leppard's Slang) but it is a trick that Terrorvision appear to have pulled off. At least for now. The single isn't their biggest hit ever but does at least become their 13th Top 30 hit since 1994.

29 PISTOL WHIP (Joshua Ryan) 

Presenting Joshua Ryan, America's best kept club secret. This track is actually over a year and a half old, having first been heard in stateside clubs in the summer of 1999. Nu-Life records have now picked up the licence for this and other past Ryan classics such as Thunderclap and The Chase and are now embarking on a campaign to get him known outside his own country. This remixed version of the '99 classic gets that campaign off to a reasonable start. How long before his name starts popping up in the remix credits of far larger hits?

33 EVERYTHING YOU NEED (Madison Avenue) 

Sad that Madison Avenue almost appear to have been lost in the mix this week, the third single from the Aussie duo can barely slide into the Top 40, a far cry from the Number 10 peak of Who The Hell Are You back in October last year, itself the follow-up to Don't Call Me Baby which had topped the charts five months earlier.

34 TRACEY IN MY ROOM (EBTG vs Soul Vision) 

When you jam two totally unconnected records together, magical things can happen can't they? Just ask Adeeva, Fragma or The Police. This record began life last year as Come Into My Room, a US house track released by Soul Vision. Sadly it failed to take off commercially, possibly because like much American house music it appeared to be locked in a 1988 timewarp. Then at the back end of last year bootleg versions of the track began appearing, this time with the original male vocal replaced by the unmistakable tones of Tracey Thorn as featured on the Everything But The Girl track Wrong (originally a Number 8 hit in June 1996). Big dance fans themselves, EBTG were happy to agree to a commercial release for the mix and so it now reappears as Tracey In My Room and with Everything But The Girl given the lead artist credit. Sadly it isn't quite as exciting a bootleg release as some we have seen in the past and the single makes a rather apologetic performance in the lower end of the Top 40. Still, it is an excuse to realise that it is now almost 20 years since Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn met at Hull University. Frightening isn't it?