What was the best year for the UK charts?

One of the surprising things chart wise in 2020 was the number of Top 40 hits I actually liked. Since starting this blog around 5 years ago I've kept an ear on the Top 40 out of duty more than anything else. Back then it was pretty terrible but 2020 appears a big improvement on recent years. 

How far back do you need to go to find a better chart though? 10 years ago every other record seemed to be some dance-rap nonsense with Pitbull or Flo Rida on it or some god awful EDM record. 15 years ago it was full of dull guitar bands like Snow Patrol or Kaiser Chiefs. Maybe 20 years ago?

One thing I was sure of was that the 2020 charts are nowhere near as good as the 90s charts, or 80s charts, maybe even 70s or 60s charts too. But then even 90s charts as we see every Sunday still have lots of crap in them.

It got me thinking, what was the best year for the charts? and whilst we're at it, what was the worst? My youth was in the 90s so logically it would be one of those years. Then again I listened to a lot of non-chart music at the time so possibly not. As a young child in the 80s I was less picky about the music I liked so it could be one of those years. Music from the 60s and 70s has a certain charm to it, but can it really live up to the music of my youth?

I therefore came up with a plan to find out. At the time of writing there have been over 22,000 Top 40 hits in total so clearly it's not practical to listen to all of them. Furthermore at one extreme you have over 700 hits from 1997 and at the other you have just 27 in 1952.

To make things fair what I decided to do was to take a sample Top 40 from each year and compare. I thought an appropriate week would be the first week in July i.e. in the middle of the year. This means we have a true representation of the year in question without having the leftovers of the previous year or a preview of what's to come the following year.

This does mean we can only include charts where there actually was a Top 40, which is 1960 onwards. However, I'm happy to leave out the 50s because the best year for the charts is definitely not in the 50s. You also often had multiple versions of the same song in a smaller chart so it would probably be biased towards certain songs too.

Every Thursday for the next 62 weeks, starting next week with 1960 I will give my verdict on the Top 40 in the first week of July with an overall score where each record gets 1 for good, 0.5 for OK and 0 for rubbish. It won't be like my Top 30 reviews where I review each song individually, it will be an overall review and I'll pick out the best and worst records that week. At the end of the 62 weeks I can determine once and for all what the best year for the charts was.