Warning! Dinosaurs are taking over the UK album chart!

You know that movie where Richard Attenborough breeds a load of dinosaurs and then they stomp all over a theme park while Jeff Goldblum from The Fly doesn't turn into a fly and Richard's all like 'screw this, I'm off to play Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street instead'?

Well, that exactly what's happening to the album charts.

The dinosaurs are taking over. Instead of the album charts being full of cool young bands like The Kneepads, Post Office Flip Flop Explosion or Digital Colostomy, it's packed with bands that have been around the block so many times, they've worn a groove in the pavement.

By the way, those cool young bands don't exist. I made them up.

Mint Royale pointed out that this week's album chart is full of incredibly old LPs because music fans are streaming the same favourites over and over again. "An Oasis compilation is getting enough steady streaming to probably just sit in the top 30 for ever," he says.

He's not wrong. The current number one album is brand new: Tyron by that cheeky scamp Slowthai has been around for precisely one week. But that's not typical. 60% of this week's top 100 has spent more than a year in the charts, which is a big rise on five years ago when it was just 35%.

Let's take a look at the longest-toothed dinosaurs in the current album chart. Here are the LPs sitting in the charts right now that have clocked up the most chart weeks since their release.

ABBA: Gold – Greatest Hits (981 weeks)
Bob Marley & the Wailers: Legend (965 weeks)
Queen: Greatest Hits (933 weeks)
Fleetwood Mac: Rumours (876 weeks)
Michael Jackson: Number Ones (483)
Oasis: What's The Story Morning Glory (476)
Eminem: Curtain Call – The Hits (449)
Amy Winehouse: Back To Black (411)
Oasis: Definitely Maybe (392)
Foo Fighters: Greatest Hits (392)

Just outside that tyrannosaur top ten? Time Flies 1994-2009, that aforementioned Oasis compilation which has spent 389 weeks in the album chart, 216 of those weeks consecutive.

This is theoretically fine. People are caning their favourite music, maybe having living room discos on Saturday nights while their pet dog looks on in confusion, and there's nothing wrong with that. You spin that old ABBA record, daddio.

However, these craggy dinosaurs will sell bucketloads of albums come rain, wind or scattered sunny spells. And they're clogging up the charts, reducing the number of chart opportunities for newer acts further down the pecking order: active bands who are writing and releasing fresh tunes in a Herculean effort to gain chart recognition.

Just a couple of blog posts ago I raved about the appearance of bleep techno in the hit parade and how it blew my tiny mind. I'm fascinated by new shiny things, like a magpie or a baby or a magpie looking at a baby. I don't want to delve into the latest album chart and see the same ancient faces with their expensive microphones and branded plectrums and anecdotes about how they met George Harrison once in a Tandy electronics shop. Serious yawn.

That's like searching on YouTube for bitcoin investment advice, or the Mars landing footage, or the latest Taskmaster challenge, and every time the only result that comes up is that bloke singing Chocolate Rain. Every time. Chocolate Rain. You try adding quote marks or searching in Welsh. No luck: just Chocolate Rain. You try the 'Contact Us' link to get help, and Mr Clippy pops up and starts singing Chocolate flipping Rain. You keep rocking those 2007 trends, daddio.

Mint Royale goes on to suggest that perhaps the album chart should be subject to ACR. This stands for Accelerated Chart Ratio: in the singles chart, this is used to weaken the chart position of songs if they've been around a while. It's a modern oddity that became necessary after Ed Sheeran almost monopolised the charts in 2017 in a move that even the Roman empire would have called "brazen".

I hope they sort it out soon. Otherwise the dinosaurs will continue to rampage unimpeded, and before we know it we've got a Lost World situation on our hands. And nobody wants Lost World.

More Fat Roland: No new electronica in the singles chart, repeat to fade (2009)

Even more Fat Roland: What's happening with the not-so-current current album chart? (2016)

So Greater Music Police have been tweeting every 999 call...

Call 1: Report of murder of deputy sheriff and his immediate superior. One suspect in custody. Keeps asking what rhymes with 'lion'.

Call 2: Silly-haired man found igniting blazes. Has apparent tourettes.

Call 3: Five black Americans arrested for using course language to police officer. Seemed to object to our "badge and mother-effing traffic gun."

Call 4: Four post-punk Londoners Three reggae-pilfering new wavers* arrested impersonating officers of the law. The blondest one waffled about tantric sex: re-arrested for being a gobshite.

Call 5: Scotsman and Liverpudlian caught driving around in an old police car, towing an ice cream van. Cargo included heavy artillery, a list of northern cities and several dead sheep.

Call 6: Eccentric man-child caught breaking and entering before attacking a woman, leaving bloodstains on the carpet. Victim's name is Annie.

Call 7: Australian woman found bludgeoned by river. Rose found in mouth of victim. A wiley Hugo Weaving lookalike was seen fleeing scene.

Call 8: Welshman complaining of theft of sun from heart. Was asked to remove balaclava but refused.

Call 9: Young men in chemical masks found in a hypnotic st-8. Had to activ-8 back-up. Won't stop bloody dancing.

Call 10: Smirking gangsters caught running around robbing banks. Evidence of cartoon-dog-based drug taking.

Call 11: Fight broken up between reptiles and local petty criminals. Eye masks seem colour co-ordinated with Teletubbies. Started doing dance routines. Probably mentally unstable: did not intervene.

Call 808: Report of sample theft by Manchester ravers...

If you want some time to figure some of these out, try to ignore the tags below this post!

*see comments section

Awful Pauls

I have discovered an important theme in modern music. If I should die, please pass this on. People need to know. (See Boring Pauls here and Gorgeous Pauls here.)

Paul Rodgers

Rodgers qualifies for this list because he was a member of one of the worst rock bands in the history of all planetary axe-weilding. He co-wrote All Right Now which got the spirit of raaawk into a headlock and squeezed all the breath out of it. The single ummed up the sanitised, by-numbers music that later led to similar fayre in the form of Lenny Kravitz and posthumous Bob Marley singles.

Sean Paul

The ever-blazin' dancehall megastar imprinted himself onto the public consciousness like he was branding cattle. It doesn't change the fact that his hits such as We Be Burnin' and Baby Boy were the audio equivalent of listening to Stephen Hawking plugged directly into a malfunctioning karaoke machine. He had such a messiah complex, he called his third album The Trinity and gibes biblical-level wisdom to his Twitter followers: "If it glitters it dosnt have 2 B gold!!! It can B a fish scale! Carefullllll of dem fish!!!"

Paul Young

I don't need to tell you that this silk suited soulboy achieved an amazing feat of perfoming self-strangulation to get that distinctive vocal inflection. To say his saccharine pop slop has made the world a better place is akin to suggesting UB40 have made it immensely easy for ginger white musicians to be taken seriously for their reggae songs. He is now a member of some Mexican-themed 80s revival band (pictured) who recorded the song Do We Really Want The Same Things? Yes, Paul, you do: you'll never change.

Paul Gadd

I am a massive believer in astrology. So for example, I am a very typical... er... um... no, I have no idea about astrology, although I do have all the signs and dates memorised for pub quiz purposes. I do believe that the number one single at the time of your birth has an important bearing on your life and its various successes. So I will never forgive Paul 'Gary Glitter' Gadd for declaring "I'm the leader" at the moment my placental juices flopped onto the hospital table of life.

Paul McCartney

This pouting thumbs-alofting wannabe frog chorister destroyed all known music in the 1960s when he played a key part in a band that had a nice line in production techniques, boasted an uber-talented bespectacled songwriter, gave the world a Thomas The Tank Engine narrator, and yet was continuously thwarted by McCartney's attempts to turn every single track of the greatest group of its time into a simplistic, bedtime song predecessor to his pièce de ridiculance Mull Of Bloody Kintyre.

Paul Simon

If only The Sounds Of Silence had been taken literally. I'm crying as I write this. He wasn't only satisfied with playing carbunkle to the Garfunkle with the drippiest pairing in the history of drips, he then released the audio equivalent of the Guardian newspaper in the smug cloud formation of Graceland, an album so plainly awful and worthy, Coca Cola's pillaging of the developing world can only be seen as some kind of misplaced revenge attack.

More Pauls

This is not over, Pauls. I have a massive list of Pauls. There are more Pauls, although be assured the Pauls will get better from this moment on. What about the Pauls that are neither here nor there? The Boring Pauls? And then, there's the Gorgeous Pauls...