In a Radio 2 documentary 'Carry on up the charts' in 2000, Paul Gambaccini says this:
“All the pop papers in Britain had their own charts, and competed with claims about which was the true one. New Musical Express was probably the single most important one, although it famously had shall we say some very strange entries in the bottom positions. It was pretty well known that a record could be massaged into the upper twenties of the top 30. And Record Retailer, which was the forerunner of Music Week, was the source that we used for the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, and it happened to have ‘Please Please Me’ as a number 2. And the BBC used an average of the charts - I would love to have been the mathematician who figured that one out! So if you read the pop papers you would have thought ‘Please Please Me’ was number one, but if you read the Trades and listened to the radio you would have thought it was number two.”
By talking about the Trades he implies that there was more than one trade paper. And he is simply wrong to say that it was number two on the radio.
“All the pop papers in Britain had their own charts, and competed with claims about which was the true one. New Musical Express was probably the single most important one, although it famously had shall we say some very strange entries in the bottom positions. It was pretty well known that a record could be massaged into the upper twenties of the top 30. And Record Retailer, which was the forerunner of Music Week, was the source that we used for the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, and it happened to have ‘Please Please Me’ as a number 2. And the BBC used an average of the charts - I would love to have been the mathematician who figured that one out! So if you read the pop papers you would have thought ‘Please Please Me’ was number one, but if you read the Trades and listened to the radio you would have thought it was number two.”
By talking about the Trades he implies that there was more than one trade paper. And he is simply wrong to say that it was number two on the radio.
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