THE MUSIC CHARTS

A lifelong obsession of mine was the music charts of Great Britain as compiled then by the BMRB (british market research bureau). I would spend hours listening to the Top 40 on a Tuesday lunchtime and on a Sunday evening writing down the positions. This began when I was 11 years old, in the summer of 1978. I was bored and I would listen to the radio a lot, and I had a very active mind. On a Tuesday I noticed there was a lot of excitement on the radio for this was when Radio One would broadcast the new chart.   I had no friends to play out with apart from my siblings, no money and no bike to ride and there was little in terms of art and creative materials or space to work with, so it was me and the radio. In those days there was not twenty four hour television, and most channels would begin broadcasting just before lunch time. In summer 1978 I became really fascinated by the music charts, the best selling records of that week, how each record sounded, the fastest risers and the highest new entries of the week.  As i mentioned earlier I started by writing down the positions of each record every week in a notebook. I then moved on to manipulating positions and creating (calculating and compiling then writing) my own charts that I would play back in my own head when I wanted comfort or relaxation from what was going on around me. Though I did well at the school I attended, I would day dream a lot, playing back my favourite tunes in my own head, I was my own jukebox.

In Record Mirror magazine charts researcher Alan Jones would write a weekly article about the charts and facts and figures about other charts in general. He would however mock some of the people who wrote to him with personal charts of various kinds. Mr Jones was also very skilled at compiling  material on singles, albums and chart positions, whilst his advantage was that he knew how much each single sold per position, and he was in direct touch with record company executives who would confirm sales. One of my favorite posts of his in Record Mirror was after the top 100 of the 1970s was published by BMRB/Music Week and broadcast officially. Alan Jones wrote an article in one of the January 1980 Chartfile columns about how inaccurate the final survey of the 1970s was and then compiled his own top thirty  best sellers of the 1970′s based upon his phone calls to record companies and other research info. Mr Jones was correct on the point that BMRB had omitted data from the last week of the year in all the years surveyed due to the “christmas break”. This meant that many records best week of sales were not added to their total sales on the final survey.  His survey is today considered to be the more authoritative.

I aimed to develop a businesslike or personal style of publication for my own chart articles. I developed a very strong love of music that still exists today. As for the charts, I developed a points system to allocate to each single’s position and I would use these to create my own “chart performance charts”. I would pretend that I was a DJ or a journalist and write articles on each chart that I had written. I would read and re-read the artcles  I had written,  My siblings could not understand what I was doing, they used to tease me about it, but I still persisted until my mid twenties. By then my “chart performance charts” were  more of an art-form, lists of singles, with fields such as weeks on chart, this week, last week, date of entry, highest position, points this week, etc., all with colour codes.

When ever I  do compile and write up the occasional charts now it is more as a hobby and for artistic effect, using colours and layout. I cannot remember some records as well as I used to but my memory of singles from between 1978-1982 is pretty good. In later years I started to study the influence of the record companies and the way in which the industry trends would support some genres at the expense of others. The worst example being in 1981 when Frankie Smith’s “Double Dutch Bus” sold some 2 million copies in the USA, 1 million on 12″, one million on 7″, yet was surveyed as only peaking at no higher than position 30 on the billboard USA singles chart survey.  It did peak at number one for 4 weeks on the USA Billboard RNB charts with a 31 week run. As a teenager i would listen to the german service of Radio Luxembourg and the Dutch station Radio Veronica on medium wave 558. I got to hear a broader range of hits by doing so, and “Double Dutch Bus” was popular in Europe but received no airplay on national British radio.  At that time there was no RNB radio show on the national stations, for a record to be a hit in Britain one of the national DJs had to endorse it. So in the early 1980s many RNB and Reggae singles, as well as other genres such as country, jazz, heavy rock did not feature in the charts because firstly, they were not played on daytime radio, and secondly and more importantly, the shops that sold such product in large quantities were not on the “chart panel of shops” surveyed by the market researchers commissioned by the music industry and the BBC.

Some of that prejudice in the UK music industry still exists today, certain genres are supported well by industry marketing and promotion. But today there is much better market research and data capture of actual record sales and popularity through downloads.  It is a trend that i have embraced: the influence of technology. Many great records that I missed  buying in those days due to unavailability in Birmingham shops, as a teenager, I have been able to since get through downloads. The days of thumbing through musty boxes at rare record fairs for a beloved track are pretty much over for me. Today we understimate the power that music as an entertainment form had in those days (1978-1984): there was less television, a very small and emerging electronic games market, no internet.

An interesting note about my chart performance charts: the most points recorded over the 1980′s for top 40 singles was Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax”. For the 1970′s this honour went to Boney M’s “Rivers of Babylon/Brown Girl In The Ring”. I stopped doing those charts in the 1990′s due to work and life pressures – I had to grow up and buy a house, get a career, get a car, buy nice things,look after girlfriends,stepchildren, etc. I did continue to collect the original primary data.

In developing my own charts has brought me some internal benefits: of self-hypnosis, an increased concentration and memory and an appreciation of  business skills, discipline and hard work.

Later on in life I discovered that I was not the only chart freak: there are many chart forums that exist now such as UKMix, where the geeks get together and compare notes freely, having escaped the vitriolic critique of Alan Jones, the BMRB/Music week/Record Mirror resident chart statistician. The material and information about the mainstream charts from any year in the UK is easy to get hold of on the internet now, and hey, who knows I may even publish a few of my charts here as PDFs.

As an additional note, for those of you interested in chart archives, you can get the official dutch top 40 charts online, every week and position since its inception in 1965.  There were some interesting number one singles in the late 1970s and early 1980s where reggae was very popular such as Dillinger’s Cokane in My Brain ( 4 weeks in 1977), and Someone Loves You Honey by June Lodge and Prince Mohammed (6 weeks in 1982). see this link http://www.top40.nl/index.aspx?week=34&jaar=1977

I would appreciate anyone who can tell me where to find an online link to the disco chart archive of Record Mirror and Black echoes. The British Library’s catalogue of Black echoes is patchy and inconsistent.

top 100 of the 1970s

Tags: Black echoes, BMRB, cross-over hits, dutch number ones, dutch top 40, genres, marketing, memory games, music industry, music journalism, music magazines, obsessions, personal charts, radio stations, radio Veronica, record fairs, Record Mirror, reggae number ones in europe, RNB singles, self publishing, singles, USA Billboard