Yesterday, Paul Gambaccini’s “Pick of the Pops” show on BBC Radio 2 featured the charts from this week in 1971 and 1988. Can you recall the Christmas #1s from those years? The answers appear below. It’s the kind of information that people of my generation (those of us who followed the charts closely) might retain… Continue reading Christmas #1s, and biting the dust at 52
Last week, on his BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show, Chris Evans played “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand” by The Beatles, a German-language version of their 1963 #1 “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. I remember enough of my O Level German to know that the title is not a direct translation. “Komm, Gib Mir Deine… Continue reading “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand”
For the third time this month I have posted a list containing a decade’s worth of “Stuck at 2” songs on the Trivia Menu. These are songs that almost made it to #1 in the UK chart but missed out by one place. Today’s list, which you can see here, is for the whole of… Continue reading Stuck at 2: the whole of the 1990s
The concept of “Stuck at 2” (songs that almost made it to #1 in the UK chart but missed out by one place) continues to preoccupy me. This piece from last week looked at the whole of the 1970s, with a link to this list on the Trivia Menu. Today’s piece looks at the whole… Continue reading Stuck at 2: the whole of the 1980s
Since posting a couple of “Stuck at 2” pieces last month (about songs that almost made it to #1 in the UK chart but missed out by one place) I have got rather carried away. After this piece (about the songs that were stuck at 2 in 1967 and 1983), and this follow-up (covering the… Continue reading Stuck at 2: the whole of the 1970s
Last weekend, in this piece, I returned to the idea of “Stuck at 2”, singles that reached #2 in the UK charts but didn’t make it all the way to the top. It listed the songs from 1967 and 1983 that just missed out on a #1 place, and those that kept them off the… Continue reading Stuck at 2: 1970, 1971, 1972
Paul Gambaccini’s “Pick of the Pops” show earlier today on BBC Radio 2 featured a couple of charts that are well worth a listen. That’s true most weeks, but occasionally there’s a horror-show from the 1990s or some year earlier in this century that I do not need to revisit. You can hear today’s programme… Continue reading Stuck at 2: 1967, 1983
In 2011 BBC4 started to screen repeats of the old BBC1 music show “Top of the Pops”. On Friday 1 April that year they showed the episode that was first broadcast exactly 35 years earlier. Brotherhood of Man were at #1 with “Save your kisses for me”. As the year progressed they continued to show… Continue reading 10 years of “Top of the Pops”
On this date in 1971 the UK #1 was “Hey girl, don’t bother me” by the Tams. Treat yourself to this performance of a great chart-topper. Rod Stewart was at #2 with “Maggie May”, listed in some charts as a double A side with “Reason to Believe”, another pair of great songs. Here’s the classic… Continue reading “It’s late September, and …”
In this piece from February 2016 I summarized the three levels of expertise that apply to practical skills, skills like speaking another language or playing a musical instrument. I categorized these three levels of expertise as “nothing, something and everything”. The first of these applies when you have no familiarity with a task. I offered… Continue reading Word of the week: transpose
