Sales are up despite week of challenges.

Last week saw a middling album release schedule, Fopp closing its doors, unseasonably bad weather and parts of London's main shopping areas being cordoned off following an attempted terrorist attack, yet, somehow, combined album sales staged one of their strongest rallies of the year, climbing 12.8% week-on-week to 2,398,020 - a total which exceeds 17 and is inferior to only eight prior weeks in the first half of 2007.

Birmingham band Editors provided the week's biggest seller, shifting 59,405 copies of their second album, An End Has A Start, on its first week in the shops. Their debut album, The Back Room, entered the chart at number 13 in August 2005 on first-week sales of 17,627 and peaked at number two some 26 weeks later, in January 2006, with sales of 39,148, as Munich secured the band its first Top 10 single.

Although Kelly Clarkson also enjoys her highest chart placing to date, debuting at number two with My December on sales of 40,509, her second album, Breakaway, sold more than four times as many copies as that in the week before Christmas 2005, when it found 175,730 takers, when it was number eight.

Completing the top five, The Traveling Wilburys' Collection slips 2-3 on sales of 38,323; The White Sripes' Icky Thump dips 1-4 ...