TOTP was put out of its misery 16 years ago. Part of the problem is that the traditional media outlets for the Top 40 have waned or vanished. The sense that no one cares is hard to avoid.ĭoes no one care? … LadBaby has been Christmas No 1 for the past four years For the last four years, the Christmas No 1 has been a charity single by a YouTube vlogger about sausage rolls, which seems to have provoked little more than a collective shrug. Say what you like about Bob the Builder or Mr Blobby, but they were at least striking in a way that Ben Haenow’s cover of OneRepublic’s Something I Need wasn’t.
This fabulously cynical piece of marketing resulted in some of the least memorable Christmas No 1s of all time.
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Perhaps it lost its lustre in the era of The X Factor, cannily positioned in the TV schedules so that the winner’s debut single was released a week before Christmas, almost guaranteeing it topped the festive chart. When was the last time you walked into a bricks-and-mortar record store and saw the Top 40, or read a news piece about a hotly contested “battle” for No 1? When was the last time you overheard music-mad teenagers talking about where a song was in the charts?Įven the Christmas No 1, once the most prestigious placing of all, barely musters any attention. This year, the UK Singles Chart is celebrating its 70th birthday in a noticeably different climate, one in which its grip on public imagination – and indeed the music industry – seems to have slackened completely. Until something – or some things – did affect it.
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It’s like a piece of software that used to work but has now had too many updates, patches and bug fixes You could mock it, ignore it or dismiss it as a corruption-filled joke, but nothing could affect its position: The Only Chart That Counts, in the words of the bullish Radio 1 jingle. Even if you professed to hate it and all it stood for, the chart still seemed totemic: the Top 40 was the thing “serious” rock bands – most famously Led Zeppelin – defined themselves against by declining to release singles. Walk into a record shop and there it was – pages pinned to the wall, singles racked out on shelves. It was as if the Top 40 was just an impregnable fact of British musical life, too important and longstanding to be shaken even by accusations that it was, at least partially, fixed.Ĭontroversy … Kate Bush’s resissue of Running Up That Hill was initially pipped to No 1. Kids continued to sneak radios into school, to hear the new No 1 revealed at Tuesday lunchtimes. There was no dip in TOTP viewing figures. Audiences didn’t turn off Radio 1’s Sunday evening countdown in disgust. But the really weird thing was the impact The Chart Busters had on the popularity of the chart.
The evidence was damning and there was fallout: shortly after the show was broadcast, the managing director of one major label resigned, supposedly “coincidentally”. “The charts are in no way a guide to what’s accurately selling,” said one former label employee. A saga of labels colluding with retailers to falsify sales figures, featuring palms greased with scotch and wine, it suggested three of the top five singles had, initially at least, been hyped into the charts: not to No 1, but just high enough to qualify for radio play and Top of the Pops. S ome enterprising soul has uploaded The Chart Busters to YouTube, a 1980 World in Action investigation into “hyping” singles that caused quite a commotion at the time.
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