ALL RIGHT, POP PICKERS!

Towards the end of 2002 an important anniversary took place - important, that is, if you love music and have a nerdy obsession with all the related facts and figures! On November 14th it was the 50 years since the first UK singles chart was compiled and published, in the pages of the newly relaunched New Musical Express. Initially a Top 12, created by Percy Dickins ringing around 20 major record stores and compiling their sales reports, it was devised as a gimmick to increase the sales of the NME, but quickly caught on. Other publications would create their own charts over the following years, as would various Pirate radio stations, leading to some differences in opinion - most famously The Beatles' "Please Please Me", which was their first chart topper according to most charts, but not in the now officially recognised Record Retailer (now Music Week) trade magazine - even on the BBC and Top Of The Pops charts. What it created was a national pastime and obsession - the Sunday evening chart rundown. Teens would gather in bedrooms up and down the country to hear whether their favourite songs had gone up or down, to hear the latest new entries, and most importantly, to hear what was No. 1 that week. Pop music was a rare currency in the days before Radio 1, MTV, and the hundreds of digital/internet stations that exist now: it was only played on the radio for a couple of hours a day (if that), and if you wanted to listen to your collection you could only do it in your home: there were no Walkmans or iPods back then. By the time i was a kid, the Top 40 countdown was essential listening. Alomg with Top of The Pops on a Thursday night, it was what you looked forward to all week, and what you talked about at school the next day. As a kid, i joined the many people up and down the country who spent Sunday evenings between 4 and 7pm with a couple of blank cassettes (usually C90, but C120 if you could get them) and finger hovered over the pause button, in the usually futile attempt to record the songs without catching the DJ's voiceover (they always talked over the outro of songs, swines). In a time when music was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now, these times were magical for music fans, and some would document the ups, downs, and new entries in notebooks (i never really went that far), commenting on their likes and dislikes.

On and around the 50th anniversary milestone, there was a flurry of articles, documentaries and compilations to celebrate this revered part of British life, and it prompted me to think about my favourite songs. Soon i was furiously writing down and compiling my own chart, which started as a Top 50 - in a homage of the 50th birthday of the singles chart - but soon became a Top 500! I wrote and re-wrote this chart several times (i had a lot of time on my hands back then), arguing with myself over why certain songs deserved to be higher up than others, remembering songs i hadn't heard in years but realised were important to me, debating whether there should be a cut off date - i decided anything released after 2001 should be excluded, as i think it takes at least 12 months for a song to prove its worth to you in the long term - and hunting down CD's in shops to find long-lost favourites. I was compiling this chart well into 2003, spending hours recording it onto MiniDisc. It was a work-in-progress for a year or so, as i would finish it only to realise that i liked one song more than another, or would hear something i'd forgotten about or never heard before. There have been quite a few "list" books written over the years, mainly by men (the need to study and compile facts and figures seems to be a uniquely male one) attempting to summarise their love of music in list form. One of my favourites was This Is Uncool: The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco, by writer and journalist Garry Mullholland. Published in September 2002, Mullholland attempts to write a history of the last 25 years (1976 - 2001) of popular music, as viewed through his own life and record collection. Every single in the book (in chronological form rather than as a chart) was part of the authors personal collection, and as such it's a very personal narrative. I would attempt to rewrite my own chart in this way, hampered by my love of music from before my birth and the beginnings of my own collection. Though my obsession with lists has waned over the last few years, i'm still attempting to compile my favourite singles into a chart, although with another 15 years of music added to the first attempt it only gets trickier! I'm sure i'll manage it one day.