Fair play to Alexandra Burke

The first time we heard about 'Elephant', we thought it sounded like a career killer.

The first time we heard a short bit of 'Elephant', we laughed.

The first time we heard it in full, we just felt a bit sad that Alexandra's personality and spirit and attitude, or what we understood all those things to be, had somehow been lost in a stampede to make a song apparently designed to sound enough like everyone else, or enough not like Alexandra, to stand some chance of sneaking into the charts without anybody noticing. Isn't Alexandra good enough the way she is, we wondered.

The first time we saw the dismal video for 'Elephant', we simply wondered why nobody involved in the video had bothered making it better.

Anyway she'd plugged the arse off it, it's out this week, and this has already happened.

It might not hold at Number 5, but it's still a not-bad showing.

We're not sure exactly what this all proves. 'Elephant' still sounds to us like a waste of a good popstar, and we're not sure even a Number 5 hit is really what Alex needs to launch her second album. But we thought it was a career killer, and while we didn't revel in potential disaster like some inhabitants of the internet's darker recesses, we were wrong. So there you go.