UK Singles Chart: The 1990s

In this journey through the chart years so far one thing which has surprised me is how much of the music I already know.

In the 50s there were barely over 1000 chart hits the whole decade many of which were the same songs recorded by different artists, though admittedly this is the decade so far with the most songs I don't know. The 60s brought many songs I've always known and several acts I consider at least good enough to listen to their greatest hits. The amount of 70s songs I know increases a lot after 1976 courtesy of the Top of the Pops reruns and similar with the early 80s prior to reaching my living memory of the late 80s.

In the 90s I remember the entire decade well. Looking at all the number ones I can tell you something I was doing in my life at that point in time for most of them. Yet what surprised me was how many hits of the 90s I didn't know. But that is more down to the sheer quantity of hits we had that decade, more than twice as many as the 50s, 60s and 70s and almost twice as much as the 80s.

Dance Music was the genre which grew the most throughout the decade and most years gave us a new sub genre of Dance Music in the charts. There were many House records every year and by the end of the decade a lot of Trance records too. There were also a decent amount of Big Beat records throughout the late 90s, but other genres weren't as consistent.

We had plenty of Hardcore Rave records in the latter half of 1991 and throughout 1992 but by 1993 it was virtually non existent in the charts. It's probably not surprising we didn't have much Happy Hardcore in the charts, but there was very little Drum & Bass in it too despite there being a show dedicated to that genre on Radio 1.

In 1997 I remember everyone talking about Speed Garage but chart wise I count 15 records I would consider to be Speed Garage from that year.

Away from Dance music we had the era of Grunge music in the early 90s, yet there wasn't an awful lot of Grunge hits in the charts. When people moved onto Green Day and Offspring there was little else in the charts that could be described as Punk.

There was a much stronger presence of Rap music in the charts, but every year it seemed to me dwarfed by the amount of R&B in the charts and had a bigger presence when the two genres combined.

Obviously given the sheer quantity of music in the charts and I've been talking about what there's been less of than expected, what actually was occupying the charts?

Basically what we would most associate the charts with, Pop music. The higher positions were occupied by the well known boy bands/girl groups etc and the lower positions by those who nobody remembers.

It was an era when most records would enter at their peak and plummet out the charts quickly rather than slowly go down the lower positions. This allowed the not so popular acts to occupy the lower positions. On top of this there were the acts who were remembered for one hit but had several other hits too that didn't chart so high, but this was nothing new.

Next up is the 2000s, a decade that I know a fair bit of the early part where there were still lots of hits, but not so much the latter part where there were less hits, so I would anticipate it taking me around 3 weeks to research each year again.