RotD Music Editor Lee Thompson shares his personal views on the evolution of the Top 40 chart show
27 March 2015 - Press releaseThe history of the Radio 1 Chart Show stretches back over four decades. I’m old enough to remember the days when singles were released on a Friday at the end of the 1970s, I was just about to become a teenager. The six-day chart week ran from Monday to Saturday (the thought of being able to buy anything on a Sunday, let alone a seven inch piece of plastic, was the stuff of pure fantasy), a motorcycle courier would collect from record stores the rather-dubious logs of what was ‘alleged’ to have been sold that week, some poor sap would then probably have to collate all this info by hand from the 250 participating outlets and compile what then became our musical bible for the next seven days. So a new chart week was already a day old when the latest update was revealed on a Tuesday lunchtime. I still have notebooks from my school days, hand-written with the latest tabulations for that week’s Top 40. An old school friend of mine, who’s now a top techie living out in California, told me recently that he was delighted to hear that I’d still clung onto these things, even though him and the other classmates would invariably take the mick out of me week in and week out for caring about such trivial nonsense and wondering why it was so important to me, whilst they were wisely elsewhere discovering what exactly what made girls tick (the answer, at the time, being John Travolta).
Top Of The Pops was on a Thursday night (straight after Tomorrow’s World). On transmission, it was already four days into the next chart week and by the time the countdown on a Sunday afternoon was played out on the radio with Simon Bates at the helm in 1978, the following chart week had already been wrapped up and you were hearing sales data that was already eight days late. Nobody really cared. It was just accepted that was the way things were. And so it remained for the best part of a decade.
On my sixteenth birthday in 1982, I remember distinctly that the No.1 song was House Of Fun by Madness as it contained the line ‘sixteen today and up for fun’. On my nineteenth birthday in 1985, Paul Hardcastle sat at No.1 with his anti-war track 19. My life was mapped out by these memorable musical chart events and I bet a few of yours were too.
Things changed for the countdown in 1987 when computer technology had advanced to the point where all the Monday to Saturday chart info was now mechanised and a Top 40 could be compiled in just hours, meaning the Sunday night chart would actually become the first-ever reveal of that week’s latest data, giving the show a topicality that it had never had before. The commercial radio network had its own chart competing with it by now. David Jensen had jumped ship from Radio 1 in 1984 and was now hosting the Nescafe Network Chart across ILR stations direct from Capital Radio in London, the UK’s first-ever syndicated commercial radio programme.
But Radio 1’s show undoubtedly had the edge. This was the real chart. This was the official one. This was the statement of record that every band, artist and label cared about. In every record shop I visited on my trips to Newcastle, this was the one that would be laminated on the counter or framed on the wall for us all to reference. This was the one that would show where the vinyl must be racked on the shelving in front of us to gaze at in awe. Imagine owning every single one of those songs.
It’s been several years now since I actually sat and listened to the Top 40 chart on Radio 1 from start to finish. But every one of a certain age has memories of taping the songs they loved from it on a Sunday afternoon to create our own personal playlist for the week ahead. I’d play them until the oxide from the C90 clogged up the tape head and the teenage nerd in me would get a cotton bud, dip it my sister’s nail varnish remover and valiantly wipe the gunk away so it didn’t sound like my favourite hits were being heard through a woolly sock any longer.
Those were the days, eh? Now, it’s all change once more.
Once a three-hour flagship broadcast that would deliver some of the highest ratings of the week and was once branded as ‘Western Europe’s Most-Listened-To Show’, it’s now going to be a one hour and forty-five minute affair on a Friday afternoon as part of Greg James’ Radio 1 slot. Speaking from experience as a bloke who has actually presented chart shows on radio stations in the past, it’s impossible to feature 40 songs in that space of time. You can just about feature 20 if you get your skates on. So we’re not going to get the full chart picture anymore, which is invariably sad. And nothing will move for Newsbeat at 5.45, so I’m told. That means the No.1 unveiling will now be at around 5.41-ish, when most of us are still working or battling to get home for the weekend. To me, that feels very wrong. Here’s betting that Capital and the commercial radio network that broadcasts their own Vodafone Big Top 40 will stick rigidly to their Sunday night 4-7pm slot. After all, they deliver twice the audience each week of the Radio 1 chart at the same time. Now, they’ll have no competition and will simply clean up, I’d imagine.
It’s wrong to think the public don’t care about charts anymore. When TV music channels run chart countdowns of current hits, it delivers most of their biggest audiences. When radio stations ask their listeners what sort of music they like, the answer is ‘chart music’. They may not know or care about the position that the latest Taylor Swift song currently resides in, but they know it’s current, sits somewhere in the chart and they want to hear it. Volume 90 of the Now That’s What I Call Music series is out this coming Monday – seven No. 1 hits scattered amongst the 45 Top 40 hits gathered up across the compilation. And it’ll sell at least eight times more than any other album released next week. The public know when a big song like Uptown Funk is at No.1, or what has made it as the Christmas chart-topper each festive season. So the appetite remains. It’s just that now, anyone can track success or failure on a minute-by-minute basis via iTunes chart sales.
I’ve a theory on why the Radio 1 chart show has fallen behind somewhat. It’s the way that it’s been presented. Too much chat, too many gimmicks and, weirdly in this day and age, probably too much social interaction. A chart show works best when you start at 40, play it in full, do a short snappy info link into No.39, play that in full and stick rigidly to that format all the way to the top. The two masters of this were Bruno Brooks and Mark Goodier. Personally, I’d love to hear Mark back doing the chart every Sunday from 4-7pm on Radio 2. Yes, Radio 2. So what if it’s two days after it was first revealed on Radio 1? You’ve more time to listen on a Sunday, plus he’d be able to feature the full list of 40 tracks, presented as it really should be presented once more. He’d bring back the lapsed audience of 40-somethings who still care about current music but wouldn’t dream of sitting through it all on Radio 1. And they’d love to re-engage with the chart again, I’m sure. Look at the latest Top 40. I see barely 10 songs that haven’t already been played on Radio 2 in some shape or form already. There’s nothing there that’s really going to sound out of place in amongst stalwarts like James Bay, Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, Taylor Swift, Olly Murs, Mark Ronson, Maroon 5, Hozier and Ellie Goulding. Right now, Radio 1 seems almost embarrassed to still have to broadcast the show each week. Put it on the nation’s most-listened to station as well each week and you have a huge audience feeling they’re back in touch with today’s superstars, which ultimately could be hugely productive for the British music industry across the board. It could add an extra million listeners to the weekly countdown and prove to be one of the iPlayer Radio most-requested shows.
Let’s get the mass audience fired up once more. Let’s get a few more chart battles happening again like the days of The Beatles vs The Stones or Blur vs Oasis.
Despite the naysayers, the Official Chart is far from dead. We’re just all a bit guilty of forgetting how important a part of our lives it’s been through our formative years. But the public interest in it all is still there, believe me. Kids do still care. Parents of kids still want to feel like they’re in touch. If the industry exposes it once more to the widest possible audience, who’s to say we won’t all benefit again in the long run?
Submit news or a press release
Want to add your news or press release? Email Paul or Kevin
Two week FREE trial