On this date in 1952 Britain’s first music chart was published in the New Musical Express. 10 facts about the music charts.
Al Martino’s Here in my Heart was the first ever UK number one single. It remained at the top for 9 weeks and was therefore the only number one single in 1952.
Prior to this, the popularity of a song was based on sales of sheet music rather than recordings. The New Musical Express (NME) was a re-launch of a magazine called The Musical Express And Accordion Weekly, which had just been taken over by a new owner in March of 1952. The new owner was one Maurice Kinn, a music promoter who had always wanted his own music paper.
The first charts were compiled by NME staff phoning 20 record shops and asking them for their best sellers, and consisted of twelve singles. It may not have been a representative sample as these were mostly based in London. In 1969, the British Market Research Bureau started collecting sales figures from about 250 record retailers throughout the UK, and the result was the first Official UK Singles Chart. The 250 shops taking part would write down their sales figures and send them in by post. In 1978, the charts expanded to a top 75 and then to a top 100 when Gallup took over the compilation until 1994. At this point Millward Brown took over. They installed e.p.o.s. terminals to collect the sales data and expanded the number of outlets used to collect the data to around 1600.
In the modern world, downloads and streaming are included as well. Crazy by Gnarls Barkley was the first song to go to number one based on downloads alone in 2006. It was around top of the charts for so long that it was pulled from sale for fear people would get sick of it. Ariana Grande’s Problem was the first to top the charts with streaming figures included, in 2014.
The first Top 40 countdown on Radio One was presented by Alan Freeman and called Pick of the Pops. The longest running presenter of the chart show was Mark Goodier, who did the Sunday night countdown from 1995 to 2002. The first woman presenter of the chart show was Jameela Jamil in 2013.
The record which spent the longest time at number one was Bryan Adams with (Everything I Do) I Do It for You in 1991. He was at number one for 16 consecutive weeks. If you count non-consecutive weeks, however, the record holder would be Sam Fender and Olivia Dean's Rein Me In in 2026, which was up and down the top ten like a yo yo, spending 23 weeks at number one, but not all at once. The record for the number of weeks on the singles chart all told was Mr. Brightside by The Killers, released in 2004 which was in the top 100 for 522 weeks. When it comes to albums, an interesting statistic belongs to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which spent just one week at number one in the Billboard chart but was in the chart for 741 weeks.
The longest number one was All Around the World by Oasis at nine minutes and 38 seconds in 1998. The shortest was What Do You Want by Adam faith in 1959, at one minute 35 seconds. Someone worked out that you could you could listen to Adam’s song six times during the Oasis track and still have eight seconds to spare.
The oldest artist to have a number one hit was Captain Tom Moore who was 100 when his recording of You'll Never Walk Alone with Michael Ball hit the top spot in 2020. The youngest was Jimmy Osmond, who was 9 years and 252 days old when Long Haired Lover from Liverpool reached number one in 1972.
There are just three songs which have reached number one four times. Three Lions by Baddiel, Skinner and The Lightning Seeds is the only one to do so with the same artist line-up. The other two are Do They Know It’s Christmas? Featuring different line-ups of Band Aid and Unchained Melody which gave Jimmy Young, The Righteous Brothers, Robson & Jerome and Gareth Gates number one hits. In fact, when Jimmy Young was number one, there were three other versions of Unchained Melody in the chart, by Al Hibbler, Les Baxter, and Liberace. This was the only time in history the same song appeared in the chart four times in a single week. Three Lions, which presumably shows up every time there’s a World Cup, also holds the record for biggest drop from number one in 2018, when England got knocked out of the competition.
The longest title of a UK Top 40 hit was Rod Stewart’s Rod Stewart And The Faces’ 1974 hit You Can Make Me Dance, Sing Or Anything (Even Take The Dog For A Walk, Mend A Fuse, Fold Away The Ironing Board, Or Any Other Domestic Shortcomings) with 115 letters.
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Graham has severe PTSD and amnesia: he is missing nine years of his life. He's also the prime suspect in a triple homicide which took place the day he disappeared.
Marcus has a secret he is afraid to reveal.
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Swallow comes from a world without technology and lacks confidence. The other women on the team bully her.
Ray is Madeleine's right hand man, the person with a solution to almost every problem. But can he convince Swallow he is the one for her when she seems to wear her heart on her sleeve?
Edward has a casual attitude to training and tends to drink too much. His attraction to Madeleine's assistant Janice, although she spurns his advances, goes some way to improving his performance.
When Janice goes missing, the team unite to launch a search and rescue mission, and in the process discover a shocking threat to life on Earth as we know it.
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