Not every young person spent their days bombing around in gangs on BMX bikes or choppers, playing ping pong down the local youth club, smoking in tree houses and looking at trainers down the shopping centre. Some of us were, in crueller times, labelled as nerds and saddos. In the enlightened 2020s we would be described as ‘people with passionate, intense and singular interests, possibly autistic’. We spent solitary days indoors making handwritten lists. Lists of trains we’ve seen, of our football teams’ top goal scorers, and, of course, endless handwritten lists of pop singles. We were legion.

We, the most isolated loners, with no terraces and railway platforms on which to converge and connect, shaped our lives around the official weekly chart of the Nation’s best selling singles, released every Tuesday (Sundays from 1987 onwards). That chart is 70 years old this month.

In the 70s, 80s, 90s heyday, we were bedazzled by these charts, compiled from sales recorded at secretly selected record shops up and down the United Kingdom. We were fascinated by the new entries, the high climbers, the records ‘in with a bullet’, and the strange sudden drops from number 1 to number 17 and on and on. And when we had rinsed the actual chart dry of fascinating information, gleaned from Smash Hits and Flexipop magazines, and snippets of useful information buried among the personality focused chatter of the Radio 1 DJs, then some of us, still hungry for pop distraction made our own charts in exercise books, with felt pens and stern, unfettered personal judgement. Charts based purely on our solitary opinions of whether the new single by The Police was ‘better’ than the current Blondie hit. In our micro universe, it could seem to be genuinely bad news for Adam Ant if his new song didn’t make OUR Top Twenties, despite the 3 weeks he’d spent at the top of the actual charts. I would spend an evening illustrating my own charts with hand drawn adverts for the new singles released that week, it didn’t seem to matter then that no one would see these charts.

Until that 1987 shake up, the chart was announced on  Tuesday lunchtimes on Radio 1. So if you were still at school, you could tune in during the lunch hour, but the timings were tight. There would be the interminable 15 minute ‘Newsbeat’ programme before the reveal, broadcast either under the idiotic belief that teenagers were interested in strikes and wars, or the belief that they SHOULD be interested in such trivial things, before the real news story of the week, ie the New Top 40. I would take my radio, pen and notebook into the woods that bordered my school to ensure absolutely no distraction during these vital Tuesday bulletins. Eventually ‘Newsbeat’ would finally end, and the rundown would begin. The first positions announced were 5,4,3 and 2 and the songs occupying these positions were cruelly played in full. This begun at 12.45 and I had to be back in class for 1. I can still feel the tension now.

Then as the new No.2 record was played, I readied my note book, checked my pen was working and began furiously scribbling down the Top 40, read at breakneck speed by the lunchtime Radio 1 DJ (This was Paul Burnett, eager to get on with his ‘Fun at 1’ comedy segment after the rundown, later replaced by oily Gary Davies who was far more interested in reading out his fan mail on air).

There was just time to hear the beginning of the No.1 before returning to lessons. I used to pin up the chart on the classroom noticeboard, and there was some casual interest from my classmates, but I never found anyone at school who matched my obsession. As an adult, social media has shown me I wasn’t actually a freak to be so enchanted by the weekly rundown, but as a teenager I felt somewhat looked down upon for being quite so besotted with pop records and chart positions.

The charts were read out at such speed sometimes a new entry would be lost, and the new, unknown (ie not part of the Radio 1 playlist) song in at number 32 would be just some nonsensical scrawl in my notepad. Did he say ‘Mark a moon’? ‘Marky Moon?  (It was ‘Marquee Moon’ actually.) It was all read out SO quickly and I would spend much of the first lesson after Tuesday lunchtimes trying to work out what Burnett or Davies had actually said so as to correct the misinformation posted up. 

In 1977 I hadn’t yet matured into an NME reader, a John Peel listener, or even a reader of tabloid newspapers. Smash Hits hadn’t been invented, so pretty much all my pop news and views came from these wacky yet establishment Radio 1 DJs. So the first time I heard the name ‘Sex Pistols’ was when it, they, whoever they were, was announced as (by far) the highest new entry at No.11, in the last week of May, with a song called ‘God Save The Queen’. But even as this was announced, I detected a strange, disappointed, tone in Paul Burnett’s voice, maybe suppressed anger, disgust even. It was odd. There was no celebration- a new entry within the Top 20 was quite a thing in May 1977 – why was Paul Burnett’s tone so muted and downbeat? As a boy, 1977 was mostly about the still exciting disco explosion, so I naturally assumed this song was a disco cover of our National Anthem, why wouldn’t I? There were disco covers of EVERYTHING in the late 1970s – The Star Wars theme, The Dr Who theme, Beethoven, everything, so a disco version of the National Anthem made perfect sense. I had never heard the name ‘Sex Pistols’. Later, of course the mystery was solved. This was a piece of pop culture history, I just didn’t know it at the time. Back in May 1977, Paul Burnett probably believed he was virtually announcing the actual assassination of the monarch, and that memory of his strange Churchillesque tone has stayed with me.

Three years later, he adopted a similar heavy addressing-the-nation tone when, following the actual assassination of John Lennon, ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ leapt from No.21 to the top spot. Again, Paul Burnett took it upon himself to judge the mood of the nation and decided it was disrespectful to reveal this as part of the usual exciting rundown format, so announced it with a glum fanfare free spoiler straight after ‘Newsbeat’. For Paul Burnett, climbing 20 places to number 1 in the charts after a sudden and brutal death was as inevitable as death itself, and was not to be celebrated. Like I said, these things stay with you.