The Holy Grail

Do you know what the worst chart statistics in the world are? The really obscure ones. The strange, freaky events that may well have happened sometime in the past but which nobody with a normally functioning brain would actually have noted and remembered and which really can only be turned up with time consuming, painstaking research.

Such was the problem thrown up by the singles chart this week when the entire Top 6 were non-movers. It was the sort of event that had everyone going "I wonder when that last happened?"

I'll tell you the truth, I actually had no idea. The freak chart blockage that everyone is used to is a non-moving Top 5 which, as I said in the commentary this week, happens rarely but not so infrequently that people don't remember it. I considered it a matter of personal pride to recall the two most recent occasions in January 94 and 98 and most especially the last time it happened in the middle of the year - April 1989 on a chart which I think I'm correct in saying I have on tape (must do a retrospective of that one sometime).

A non-moving Top 6 was an altogether trickier prospect and after consulting with other interested parties on Sunday afternoon, we came to the conclusion that the only time in the past was the famous 1955 all-static Top 7 that became the subject of the commentary. Normally when there is a stat that nobody is quite sure about, my common tactic is to run with it anyway as fact and work on the basis that people will swiftly fire off corrections within about an hour of the column appearing online - a useful cheat that I'll quite happily admit to using. This time nobody did step up to correct it immediately so it passed as fact, I even read out the 1995 Top 7 in the podcast to illustrate the point.

Then, as the comments below will reveal, the truth did come out and a chart from 1981 was identified as also having a static Top 6, thus invalidating most of what had been written all week. File that under shit happens.

So how on earth would anyone be able to research something like that? Well the answer is simple - by using a very famous book that no longer exists but which has become something of a holy grail to a whole new generation of chartwatchers. I've written about it before, but it is worth returning to the subject again. The Guinness Book Of Top 40 Charts. This is my copy:

Now on the face of it, the prospect of anyone having the remotest interest of a book that does nothing more than list Top 40 charts week by week from 1960 onwards is quite a baffling one. Even the authors themselves admitted in the first edition that they never imagined anyone would want such a publication, but in the face of overwhelming demand they brought it out anyway. The problem it faced of course was that whilst demand from a hard core of enthusiasts was high, the book was still not the kind of thing the casual music fan would choose to populate their library with and so mass appeal was limited.

That kind of explains why the book only lasted two editions, the final one coming out in 1996 and featuring charts up to the end of 1995. It also coincided with a downscaling of the Guinness Books brand, the company reducing their portfolio of publications to a manageable number as a prelude to selling off the entire business. In the face of cuts of that size, a limited appeal book that required some hefty licensing fees being paid to make it to the shelves in the first place was simply never going to survive the axe.

So ever since, the only way to obtain a full record of singles charts gone by has been to track down a second hand copy of a long since out of print book. As a result any copies that do appear on the open market tend to attract quite a premium, although at the time of writing none seem to be around. Twelve years ago my second edition had a cover price of £15.99. The book has a listing on Amazon and occasionally copies appear on marketplace, attracting prices in excess of £80 at times. A quick ebay search shows nobody with a copy to sell at the moment, just a few vintage editions of British Hit Singles show up, none attracting bids over £10.

I'll freely admit, I can understand the appeal. I did after all buy both editions when they first came out. I live in fear of the day my copy finally falls apart as it has proved extremely useful in the past, most especially a couple of years back when I was writing and producing the Time Tunnel feature for the James Whale show on Sunday afternoons on talkSPORT. An integral part of that was challenging people to guess what song was in the Top 3 this exact week x number of years ago, information that was gleaned from the Guinness book.

It is a dilemma that one day a bold publisher will try to solve. The Official Charts Company have started to maintain an online archive but that only dates back to the start of 2007 when they began to preserve the pages. Putting the rest of the history online is a hercluean task that the tiny company is unlikely to ever have the resources to do. As we have already seen, the market for books on the music charts is empty at the moment, killed off due to oversaturation over the past few years, thus making the appearance of any other book of niche interest extremely unlikely.

So for the moment the Book Of Top 40 Charts remains a holy grail to many people and a source of some slight smugness for those of us who have one. It clearly remains a popular subject, in the course of the last year variations on the google search "book of top 40 charts" have accounted for a substantial number of hits on this blog, something that I suspect is only going to increase with this posting going online.

In the meantime, happy hunting, and here for your delectation the evidence of the all-static Top 6 from May 1981 which it took most people until midweek to track down.