However looking around the web and attempting to purchase books which will provide all the information has proved fruitless. There are a series of books in the US by Joel Whitburn which I, and everyone else would thoroughly recommend to anyone who is interested in chart music. However, the UK appears not so organised and no such books exist that list charts week by week. If someone would publish such a book, I would certainly buy, or I would be delighted if one of the professional websites put this information on the net. Currently however, they do not. The official charts company website does have some historical charts but not going back very far. I don't know what their future plans are.

One might think there was a conspiracy of silence about the actual chart rundowns, I wonder why this information is not freely available. Yet if one is prepared to do a little research and spend some time, the British newspaper library in Colindale London NW9 and the British Library at Kings Cross have all the information to hand, one only has to turn up, satisfy the criteria as a reader and order the charts to view and copy. It helps that I had a lot of the information taken at the time, but the album chart rundowns of the mid 1950s, no I wasn't born, let alone making notes of the chart. Several visits to the British newspaper library at Colindale later and I now have copies of all of the individual weeks charts.

Why just the top tens? Why not go further to include the top 40 or even the top 75 or top 100. Most people cannot remember hits from outside the top 10. I appreciate this is a wild generalisation, but I'm not referring to those interested specifically in charted music, but anyone just interested in pop music would not recognise minor hits, even if they did recognise and could name all the major ones. I don't know how many copies, a single has to sell to only reach number 11, but week on week, it is not very many. Even in the album charts where sales are currently much higher, the lower positioned albums do not sell too many within any specific week. 

After 23 years in the music business, I noted almost perpetual sales by the major record shops, where albums would be offered for a short period as 2 or even 3 for £10 or many other combinations and prices. This would often have the effect of propelling long forgotten albums back into the chart, usually outside the top 10 which distorts the chart accordingly. Now one could argue that the album chart is open to manipulation by the marketing campaigns of the record companies, particularly TV advertising, but that is only an extension and a very good way of letting people know the product is out there. I consider this to be different to one specific record shop having an album at a lower price, thus getting it into the chart. Besides, the sheer volume of typing would be prohibitive, I would never get anything else done and this website only has a limited amount of space. Let one of the professional sites provide this information, I would be delighted. 

Uploading as and when I get the time to work on this site. In the meantime, if you want a complete top 10 listing, e-mail me and I will send by return e-mail.