It seems that making teenage girls (and a fair portion of teenage boys, albeit more secretly) moist is no longer enough to guarantee you a waft-in to number one. Busted, who we have a sneaking regard for, can only clatter in at number three with Sleeping With The Light On which, while a creditable performance, is probably enough these days to prompt emergency meetings at the record label. We're guessing the nuclear option will be deployed, and expect One of Busted to have a high-profile short-lived romance before October. Please, just not an Olsen twin. What will smart even more is that Blu Cantrell's Breathe has been number one for (in 2003 terms) eons and eons, and the band couldn't even shift Ultrabeat from number two, either. Jamieson is a new entry at four (Complete) with some of that UK garage stuff which is meant to be so over now (although so is buying singles, so I guess you can't expect people who still purchase them to pay any concern to the diktats of fashion). Richard X and Kelis are in at nine with Finest Dreams, the reconstruction of the Human League and the SOS Band. We're wondering if it isn't time Mr. X moved on to doing something else, lest he gets himself pegged as the Starsound/Jive Bunny of our day - there's clearly more mileage to be had in the - ahem - mash-up cover genre, but MTV electing to give a whole show over to it suggests that the smarter move would be to move on.

R Kelly and 'Big Trigger' (is that what he's calling it these days?) hit ten with Snake (oh, maybe that's it); Stacie Orrico is the latest in the long line of too-young girls having hits - we don't know if her mother is also her manager, and we certainly don't know if she's siphoning off the earnings from this hit, but if she's not, then there's going to be no trace left when this career sinks deeply into Guiness Book footnotes. [Note to self: delete if she has two top-selling albums]. Korn's Did My Time (from the new Tomb Rader movie - we'd have got Billy Bob Thornton to do it ourselves) is in at fifteen, and like a voice from the past David Sneddon charts at 19. You might recall Sneddon was the soulless winner of last year's Fame Academy, and so it's perhaps appropriate that this flops just as the next soulless winner is gearing up to take over his title. Kings of Leon enter Molly's Chambers at 23, while the second sighting of a Kellis new entry - this time with P Diddy on Let's Get Ill makes a sickly 25, something Puff will be pissed off about.