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Commercial radio stations to air old charts in traditional chart slot

By | Published on Thursday 9 April 2015

David Jensen

Now, let’s see if you, like CMU’s esteemed editor Andy Malt, can go from “what a nonsense idea” to “actually, I’d quite like to listen to that” without taking a breath on hearing this news.

With chart time officially set to shift from Sunday to Friday later this year as a result of that pesky global release date the ‘man’ is forcing on us all, two different commercial radio stations have come up with a clever wheeze to satisfy all those people who yearn – yearn I tell you – for some chart-style goodness alongside Sunday tea.

Both Absolute 80s and three local stations owned by UTV will start airing a ‘classic chart’ each Sunday in the 4pm slot currently occupied over on Radio 1 by ‘The Official Chart’. So basically they’ll count down a chart from the past (just the 1980s in the case of Absolute, it might come from the 70s or the 80s on the UTV stations), presumably as if it’s new.

And while that might sound like a tiresome gimmick, if they actually play the charts-from-the-past in full, it would be a fun way to be reminded of old tracks that just never get played on the radio anymore. Most of them will have been forgotten for a reason, of course, but there might be some gems in there too.

UTV wins with this venture, though, because it’s only gone and hired the chart man himself (to anyone over 35), the one, the only, the ‘kid’, Mr David Jensen. Who says this: “I’ve always loved counting down the Top 40 for the nation and I’m really excited to be able to bring back the charts from years gone by in my ‘Flashback 40′”.

So there you go. Let’s all get our cassette players out and pirate the fuck of the proceedings shall we? No. Let’s not.



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