The Sunday Charts Old Style

Top end technology in its day

The charts mean little to me today, just not my cup of tea and way off my musical taste anyway. There was a time when the charts were important major influences on my music. Back in my youth especially on a Sunday, listening to the charts from the BBC. There was Top of the Pops and I also like Juke Box Jury on the TV but it was the radio where it was happening. 

In the early 70s, we had a new addition to the family a cassette recorder opening a completely new world. It was fantastic for home recording with the handy microphone and on a Sunday, you could find me somewhere ready and waiting for that tune/song to record.

Old style cassette tape

You would need a quiet room for your recording session. The last thing you wanted to record family shouting or slamming doors on your recording. I would lay on my bed primed and ready to push the red record button. Not so easy has it sound sometimes the red button would be stuck and you had miss the start of the song you wanted to record. You had to make sure the batteries were ok because it they were low on power your cassette player wouldn’t work properly.

The dreaded birds nest

There were drawbacks to cassettes tape. If your equipment was misbehaving, your tape could start unwinding in the machine, leaving you with a mess. The classic way to get the cassette back to normal was to stick a standard pencil in a tape spool and spin it to tighten the tape back together. If the tape was broken, however, you were probably out of luck. There was nothing worse than not getting the whole song taped. It sometimes didn’t help by an overzealous presenter queuing up the next song towards the end of the song you were taping. Some would tape the whole top twenty, not me, I was interested in cherry picking the songs I liked. It was all guesswork back in the 70s who would be in the top twenty. The BBC had the official chart show and if you missed it, you would have to wait for the newspapers on Monday, the mid-week music papers, or Top of the Pops on Thursday.

Today the top twenty is everywhere with the big difference sales. They have drying up to next to nothing compared to my youth when you needed to sell hundreds of thousand to make to top selling single. Today a few thousand can get you in the top twenty.