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The History of the British Charts Britain`s official pop charts are 50 years old this month. But how did they come into being? Alan Smith and Keith Badman investigate for Record Collector.

While on the surface, the British pop charts have been the epitome of all that is safe and acceptable in mainstream music, the listings themselves have never failed to court controversy. Right on cue, in the run-up to the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the first-ever singles chart, Chris Cowey, producer of Top Of The Pops launched a venomous tirade against the state of the official Top 40, describing it as "dysfunctional." "Most of the Top 10 singles are new entries", he claimed, "and they`re there because of clever marketing practices employed by record companies, not because they`re popular." A case of the feeding hand being bitten, perhaps?

Whatever the case, there is no doubt that the pop charts still hold a particular fascination for many who have grown up with them over the last 50 years. Although many record buyers out of their teens these days probably scratch their collective heads, wondering how a particular record has made it to the still-coveted No. 1 spot - "you had to sell a million in my day" - the charts continue to hold a perennial, almost morbid, grip on millions of us who want to know what`s up and what`s down, what`s in and what`s not.

The old chestnut about the need for a more reflective basis for pegging artists` true popularity has haunted the industry for decades, and a Top Of The Pops based on album rather than singles sales would redress the balance. In the meantime, the singles charts remain as much a source of communal shared interest as the football results or the kiss-and-tell tales of TV stars and politicians. In short, the charts are a national institution.

But it wasn`t always like that. While Guinness` renowned pop chart books, Hit Singles and Hit Albums , list "official" charts for the 1960s onwards, it wasn`t until February 1969 that the BBC and the UK record industry commissioned a genuinely "official" chart from the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB). Prior to that, there were numerous listings competing for attention, all of which drew inspiration from the home of the chart concept, the United States.

The first US music charts were actually for song-sheet sales, reflecting a healthy market for piano music over and above that for new-fangled shellac recordings, and were first broadcast on the Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade radio show on 20th April 1935. Among the 15 top tunes bought by the public at that time were "The Fleet`s In Port Again", "Shoe Shine Boy", and the No. 1, "It`s A Sin To Tell A Lie".

By the outbreak of the Second World War, with sales of records on the increase, the long-established Billboard entertainment magazine decided to provide a tally of the sales and radioplay of 78 rpm shellac discs. This was published for the first time on 20th July 1940, alongside a chart for less popular "albums" based solely on their sales performance. (In those days, an album meant a set of double-sided 78s housed in cardboard sleeves within a gatefold album.)

Other American publications such as Cashbox, Record World and Variety soon followed Billboard`s lead, presenting their own weekly listings, and soon after the end of the War, the idea crossed the pond to Blighty.

In 1946, the first, occasional "Top Tunes" song sheet chart for the UK appeared in Melody Maker, the predominantly jazz music paper founded in 1927. The chart became a weekly fixture in 1951, by which time, despite postwar austerity, the sales of 78s were overtaking those for song-sheets in Britain. In November 1952, New Musical Express got one over its Melody Maker rival, with the UK`s first weekly singles record chart, showing Al Martino at peal position with "Here In My Heart". The chart was compiled by the NME`s advertising manager, Percy Dickins, who phoned between 15 and 30 London record stores - from a pool of 53 in total - for their best-selling singles (though he did not gather their total sales figures). The NME`s "Hit Parade" of a dozen tip singles was later aired by Radio Luxemburg, and its success spawned numerous competitors, the first of which, from January 1955, was a Top 10 in Record And Show Mirror (later Record Mirror). This was based on postal returns from 15 to 20 retailers (rising to 40 by 1962) and during the 50s it was being quoted by many newspapers.

In April 1956, Melody Maker joined the fray with its own Top 10, which featured the likes of Johnny Dankworth, Frank Sinatra, Lonnie Donegan, Dean Martin and Bill Haley, not to mention the No. 1 spot held by the Dream Weavers (with "It`s Almost Tomorrow"). The paper also supplied details of the stores across Great Britain and Northern Ireland that it used to compile its figures. (This pan-UK coverage set a precedent that future chart compilers Gallup would eventually follow in 1984, when it incorporated sales figures for Ulster into its chart for the first time.)

In February 1958, Gerald Marks, the editor of another pop weekly, Disc, supplemented his magazine`s new singles Top 20 (compiled from 25 record store returns) with a novel system of awarding gold and silver presentation discs to artists who sold a million or a quarter of a million records, respectively.

Last on the scene was the new trade magazine Record Retailer (the forerunner to Music Week), which used about 20 outlets for its Top 50 from March 1960 onwards. Faced with this panoply of listings, the BBC`s Pick Of The Pops radio show - first aired on 4th October 1955 - decided to calculate an average of the music press` singles charts for its own purposes, and BBC TV`s Top Of The Pops did likewise for its op 20 from 1964.

A chart for the less popular albums format, however, didn`t appear in the music press until LP sales began to take off in the late 50s. The innovator was Record Mirror, with a Top 5 from the beginning of 1956. It was followed by Melody Maker, whose Top 10 albums chart first appeared in November 1958 and, from March 1960, a Top 20 in Record Retailer (whose figures were also used by the Record Mirror from March 1962). The NME`s Top 10 appeared in June 1962 and Disc eventually caught up in 1965.

It was the huge growth of the singles market, though, with annual sales of over 50 million even before Beatlemania that transformed the nature of the charts. In the space of a few years, it evolved from a fun snapshot of record buyers` tastes into a talisman of the record industry. And in this development lies the thorny question of which contemporary chart actually offers the truest guide to artist form at that time - an issue which has never finally been resolved.

Who to believe? Widely-respected, authoritative publications such as Guinness` chart singles and albums series and Tony Jasper`s Top 20 guides give the impression that the charts that they use are the key ones of the pre-1970 era. This "fact", however, has been questioned by recent research. While Guinness` compilers plumped for the NME chart prior to 24th March 1960, Jasper drew on the Record Mirror, then both used Record Retailer figures until 15th February 1969. The central question that needs to be addressed is, whether Record Retailer or any other source can be considered the most reliable source for chart information. Although the RR chart provides the longest-lived Top 50 of the era, the crux for any listing of this kind has to be the size of its sample.

Record Retailer Guinness` chart expert, Dave McAleer, believed that the RR chart was compiled from hundreds of record shop returns, thereby providing the best guide to actual sales from 1960 onwards. But Paul Clifford, the manager of the Chart Information Network, has uncovered documentary evidence that the first RR chart of March 1960 was compiled by telephoning just 30 record stores, a figure which has been corroborated by Stephen Old of the Media Entertainment Research organisation.

The RR`s sample grew by March 1962 to 40 stores, 60 a year later, and 80 by 1969. As will be seen, this figure falls far short of its main competitors, Melody Maker and NME, and even Disc sampled 70-100 retailers between 1963 and August 1967, and 200 by 1969. Indeed, the BBC`s 25 Years Of Top Of The Pops book notes that only one member of the RR`s staff called up retailers, a broader sampling process being beyond the limited means of a trade paper such as the Record Retailer. Further undermining its credibility, RR`s chart was compiled Monday-to-Monday rather than on Fridays like its competitors, resulting in some wild swings, notably in May 1960, July 1967 and August 1968, with three joint chart toppers, while the No. 1 at the turn of 1968/69 alternated back and forth between the Scaffold`s "Lily The Pink" and Marmalade`s "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" - both Beatles-related novelties.

The RR chart was also the only one never to list any Beatles single going straight in at No. 1, nor to place either their "Please Please Me" or the Rolling Stones` "19th Nervous Breakdown" at the top spot. Finally, the RR`s points system for allocating chart positions was based on the placings that singles achieved in RR`s designation shops, rather than the actual total sales figures, and this resulted in tied singles and even some joint No. 1s.

Guinness` Dave McAleer points out that the only continuing Top 50 of the 1960s was the one in the Retailer. But this does little to further the argument that it was the most authoritative. Indeed, competing Top 50 listings in Disc (which ran from April 1966 to April 1967) and Melody Maker (September 1962 to April 1967) were reduced to Top 30s because "have-a-go" band managers tried to influence the lower ends of the charts by hyping their acts. This fact was highlighted by the editor of the Melody Maker, Jack Hutton, in April 1967, and confirmed by Michael Cables` subsequent investigation in The Pop Industry Inside Out. This was not a recent phenomenon - from Radio Luxemburg in the 1950s to the birth of pirate radio in 1964, unscrupulous programme planners were not averse to helping a platter`s progress, provided a small expenditure or favour had been exchanged.