“We haven’t done anything for other artists before, but we feel like we might be ready to do that now,” he mused to – YOU KNOW IT GUYS – the Daily Star Playlist.

“I like the idea of writing a song and giving it away and letting it loose on the world.”

But why does that idea appeal to you, Theo?

“Then you are free of it, so it goes on a little journey of its own,” he added.

The article also ‘reveals’ that the duo will release ‘Blind’ as their next single.

Justin beat off One Direction by just 3,100 copies, as their ‘One Way Or Another (Teenage Kicks)’ charity single climbed four places to Number 2 following Friday’s Comic Relief telethon thing.

Having taken the ‘top spot’ in the midweeks, circle fan Nicole Scherzinger’s ‘Boomerang’ entered at Number 6, which is probably about right, all things considered.

Elsewhere on the chart, Nelly’s ‘Hey Porsche’ is new at Number 17, Taylor Swift’s ’22′ is new at Number 26 and former American Idol runner-up Blake Lewis enters at Number 38 with that song off the advert, ‘Your Touch’.

On the album chart, upcoming singer David Bowie entered at Number One with ‘The Next Day’, which sold 94,000 copies to become the fastest-selling album of the year so far.

Bon Jovi’s new opus ‘What About Now’ is another new entry at Number 2, while Hurts’ ‘Exile’ is new at Number 9.

You can see the full charts here and here.

“We knew we’d have achieved what we wanted to if we got six months down the line and forgot our own names and walked round like ghosts in this flat,” explained Theo to the BBC, with regards to sessions in a small flat in Manchester.

“I had a moment where I watched shopping channels and ate four boxes of fig rolls,” Adam announced. “I didn’t speak to Theo for two days.”

In a statement that perhaps sums ‘Exile’ in unintended ways, Theo then added: “Once you’ve lost perspective, you can’t go any further.”

‘Exile’ is of course out now.

Hurts’ not amazing new single ‘Miracle’ now has some fairly bloody artwork to go with it.

We’ve hidden it in the post somewhere, so good luck trying to find it.

‘Miracle’ is out on March 10, while the album is out a day later.

In fact, you can listen to ‘Exile’ in full here if you like.

People keep asking what we think of the Hurts album.

We’re not keen.

We wrote a big long post about the whole thing but it just made us sad so we’re going to leave it at ‘we’re not keen’. We’ve lived with it for a few weeks now so this is, sadly, our final answer.

They’re still our favourite band and it doesn’t feel very good saying that one of our second-most anticipated album of 2013 is less than great, but if we say it’s great when it’s not how will you trust us when we say the third album’s a storming return to form?

Anyway, you might like it. There are clips on iTunes now so give it a whirl.

If anyone would like the tape recorder, cassette and jacket leave a comment below telling us why we’re wrong, and the person who comes closest to changing our mind gets the stuff.

:(

There are three parts to this post.

• In the first bit, we’ll explain why Vine is great as a pop thing. If you don’t know what the hell we’re banging on about re the whole ‘Vine’ thing, this is the bit you’ll need to read first.
• In the second bit, which is the ‘titular’ countdown of Vines, we’ll talk you through ten good ones that we’ve seen.
• And finally, we’ll list six things we want to see on Vine in the next six days.

Without futher ado:

Why Vine is great as a pop thing

First and foremost, pop music is all about pop moments.

They should be capital-’p’ capital-’m’ Pop Moments really, because they’re pretty important. The way they’re strung together – within a song or across a career or throughout a live show, or whatever – is important too, but if you don’t have Pop Moments, you don’t have pop.

The recent explosion of ‘GIF culture’ (oh dear) has allowed fans to centre in on specific Pop Moments and it’s started to feel like pop itself is responding. If you look at a video like this…

…you can’t go longer than five seconds between GIF-friendly Pop Moments.

Obviously there’s only so much time you can spend watching One Direction touching each other, and in real life most of the best Pop Moments combine sound and vision. Which is why Vine is great. Sound’s off by default, but you can have it if you want. Communicating in six-second bursts of sound and vision is ideal for popstars and pop fans and the people who make pop great, making Vine the perfect medium for the Pop Moment.

It’s relatively early days for Vine and certain aspects are certainly a huge pain in the arse – it’s owned by Twitter, for instance, but it’s not built into Twitter’s apps, integration with Twitter is shonky at best, and it’s only available as a standalone app for iPhones and iPads. Hopefully they won’t take too long sorting it out because we’d like this to take off.

Anyway here is that countdown of Vines that we were talking about.

Ten Vines we have quite liked

10. Bowling with Tegan & Sara.

This was actually recorded (Vined?) yesterday evening at Tegan & Sara’s album launch thing by Popjustice Features Editor Michael. The gentleman you see near the end is legendary rock critic Owen Myers.

9. The Hurts promo thing continues.

As you know, Hurts sent a load of journalists jackets with their new logo on, and invited said ‘journos’ to wear said garments when attending tonight’s gig. Perhaps the band have had second thoughts about sending people out onto the streets of London with that logo on their lapel so on Tuesday they sent out some necklaces inside Russian dolls which The Media have now been invited to wear instead. The Vine you see above is from Michael Lewin, the editor of Notion magazine. (This would usually be the bit in a ‘here’s a new social media thing’ piece where we’d link to Michael’s Vine account but you can’t do that because Vine doesn’t exist properly on the internet, due to being annoying.)

8. Here’s The Good Natured decorating some CDs.

We like The Good Natured.

7. Parlophone have done a Vine.

This is included mainly because it’s got Kylie in it, and you can’t go wrong with a bit of Kylie.

6. Madeon has been ‘Vining’ from the Gaga tour.

Imagine if he ‘Vined’ a bit of a new Lady Gaga song. JESUS CHRIST IMAGINE.

5. Little Boots went to the Hayward Gallery don’t you know.

Cultural.

4. Dido: loops quite pleasantly. 

What you’ll be noticing here is that the ‘countdown’ format of this countdown is completely arbitrary and we’re just running through them in the order we came across them.

3. Professor Green strained to have a shit.

Professor Green has done a Vine of himself on the toilet making some alarming noises. Sadly he just published it to his Vine followers and didn’t Tweet it, so (due to some of the limitations we mentioned above) we weren’t able to get its URL, and because of that we weren’t able to embed it here. You’ve had a lucky escape, to be honest.

2. Our nemesis Porter Robinson has been busy.

‘Porter’ (if that is his real name) has done three Vines so far. Two involve dogs, one involves a car accident. The modern music industry in microcosm, ladies and gentlemen.

1. Last but not least, at Number One, it could only be: EMELI SANDÉ.

What roundup of something vaguely musical would be complete without omnipresent wobbly hair practitioner Emeli Sandé? Yes that’s right everyone, Emeli Sandé is PON DE VINE. Yet, sadly, she has not been sharing her fascinating snippets of life with her Twitter followers so, yet again, we cannot embed her Vines. It’s probably for the best – the excitement might have been too much.

And finally: six things we want from Vine in the next six days

1. We want Leona Lewis on or near a horse.

2. We want tour rehearsal Vine from Girls Aloud.

3. We want someone – BUT PLEASE GOD NOT IMOGEN HEAP – to make an ‘album’ of six six-second songs, each with their own video.

4. We want something from Lady Gaga. Anything from Lady Gaga. This is the perfect medium for Gaga. COME ON STEFANI!

5. We want Cliff Richard shouting “CHRISTMAS TIME MISTLETOE AND WINE HERE I AM DOING A VINE”.

6. And hey how about some hilarious banter from The Wantezzzzzzz

In summary

This could really, properly, actually be the best internetty thing to happen to pop since Twitter, but they need to sort out the sharing side of things before everyone loses interest. THE END.

PS: Popjustice is on Vine…

…so find us and add us when you sign in.

The votes have now been counted (by Facebook) and screengrabbed (by us) and are as follows:

We’d be happy with all but two of those. Perhaps the whole lot could join together to create some sort of SUPERCHOIR.

Then again, over the weekend, there was a bit more chat about rumours that seem to have been floating around for the last week or two regarding Kimberley ‘Walsho’ Walsh being the UK entrant.

We haven’t asked anyone to confirm or deny this rumour because it’s 2013 and that’s just not how it works any more, sorry everyone, but what would be good, right, is if Walsho did indeed go off to represent the UK, accompanied by four familiar backing vocalists.

That would be amazing, right? RIGHT?

Come on guys.

(By ‘four familiar faces we’re talking about the rest of Girls Aloud by the way, not Palma Violets.)

(We keep referring to it as a dry cleaning place because we don’t know where to put the apostrophe in dry cleaner’s’.)

So here we go.

It’s the dry cleaning place!

Let’s get the ticket out.

At this point the man at the dry cleaning place starts chuckling. We start wondering if this might be an elaborate assassination attempt, but he goes off to find our mystery jacket.

He brings it to the counter. He’s still chuckling away. “Who brought this in?” we ask. More chuckling.

Back at the office, we take off the plastic wrapping.

It’s the Hurts logo!

But what’s this in the inside pocket?

A GOLD CASSETTE.

Lovely.

Anything else?

It’s a photo with the date of Hurts’ London show on it.

Let’s get that cassette into the tape player, shall we?

Lovely.

This is what it sounds like.

There are some bits of songs on the tape, as well as a load more radio waffle, but we’ll probably get told off for putting those online.

What have we learned?

1. Pop is exciting.
2. Hurts are amazing.
3. The end.