I awake to the news that the BBC Radio 1 Chart Show is being moved to Friday afternoons at 4.00 pm. Well, it’s not really news of any great significance to me since I completely lost interest in the charts once Queen’s ghastly Bohemian Rhapsody entered the charts, and I’m afraid I don’t know from one week to another what is the number one single.
Actually, it might actually be A Good Thing since the way in which we ‘consume’ music has changed beyond all recognition. There are no singles as such – the CD killed the single – and the legal ways of buying music now lie with ITunes and Spotify. And of course, many people steal their music from the web. We need to be clear about this: it doesn’t matter whether you illegally download music by multimillionaires Coldplay or the local artist who is struggling to build a career, it is no different from walking into HMV, picking up a handful of CDs and leaving the store without paying.
Anyway, the chart show. I think the last time I actually listened regularly to the chart show was in, gulp, 1982 when Tony Blackburn was the presenter, although my very favourite presenter was Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman. The charts mattered in those days and we used to sit in the school fields or common room listening by our transistors to find out if T Rex had beaten Slade to number one. I was in the T Rex camp, I have to admit, and I was usually disappointed. I loved buying 7″ vinyl singles, or rather I loved it when my mum went to HMV for me to bring them home. We had an old fashioned record player where you would pile all the records on a contraption above the turntable and once one record had finished another would flop down and play. The height of technology. Who needs an iPod?
The move from vinyl to CD sounded the death knell for singles, although I did, for a while, own a large collection of cassette singles, having wrongly judged that cassettes were the way forward. But there was no substation for real vinyl. The excitement of a new single could not be beaten.
There was a time when Johnnie Walker presented the charts on, I think, a Tuesday lunchtime, with the number one single being announced just before 1.00 pm. but it all went downhill shortly after! As a young person, and believe me I was once a young person, everyone knew what was the number one single. In fact, since I purchased four music magazines a week – NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Disc and Music Echo – I could name all the new releases and chart entries too. And thanks to the Record Song Book, which I also bought, I knew all the words of the songs. Music was not only something to listen to, it was for anoraks and believe me, I had a very large anorak, so to speak.
In the early stages of relative old age, I listen to BBC 6 Music and BBC Radio 2 for my music and the charts are an absolute irrelevance to me. They are rarely referred to, apart from in the charts of the past via Tony Blackburn’s excellent Pick of the Pops and Ken Bruce’s quiz show ‘Popmaster’. Surprisingly, when I do, from time to time, check to see what’s in the charts, I know more of the acts than I thought I might.
I don’t think I will be listening to the new chart show because Radio 1 is for ‘da yoof’, not old codgers like me. I would like to see a modernised Top of the Pops restored to BBC prime time, just to let us see some of the modern day artists as well as listen to them. The main channels for most of the year show almost no music at all.
Good on the BBC for trying something new, but in the words of Carole King, “It’s too late”.
